Malls R Us (2009) User Reviews

Curious (if uneven) look at shopping meccas

[Mr-Fusion · 6/10 · 11 September 2017]

"Malls R Us" is not an easy movie to find (unedited, at least), so anticipation's been steadily building for several years. Worth the wait? Well, in some ways.

A good deal of the running time is used to show how shopping malls have expanded to other countries and have ballooned in scope; urban retail resorts is the name of the game now, merging consumerism with nature. It's here that the movie loses focus considerably. And for all the talk about bigger and better, it's a fairly somber piece.

Which actually dovetails nicely with those segments that work the best; namely, the decline. It turns out the most interesting scenes involved Peter Blackbird from deadmalls.com, ruminating on the remains of once-thriving places of retail worship. What's more sad (or eerie) than a dying mall? Or worse, those that have closed but still stand; ghost town parking lots, scars of JCPenney signs left over. One of the interviewees said that malls were built in the hopes of drawing people back to blighted cities . . . and they've become blight unto themselves. This documentary does a terrific job hammering home that point (in its limited screen time) and I found that aspect the most fascinating.

6/10

A dearth of information, so many questions unanswered...

[whynot2 · 3/10 · 4 November 2009]

Caught this on a documentary channel; I was fairly disappointed, although I suppose that might be as much an issue with me not getting the information that I'd like to have, as opposed to the quality of the program.

The show describes, albeit it in broad, vague terms, the demise of many malls in the U.S., and in Canada. It's a real phenomenon: Trafalgar Village was redeveloped into a Home Depot in Oakville; Unicity was redeveloped into a Walmart in Winnipeg, with many others around North America. 'Malls R Us' illustrates this trend with images of abandoned or near-abandoned malls. These images are sad; of course, in the same way that driving through an older town's largely abandoned downtown is sad. The program then goes on to show where new malls are happening: in the developing economies of Asia, and in the hyper-rich areas of the Middle East.

The odd thing about the approach is that, I feel like I'm being asked to be sad and nostalgic for the malls closing around me, while malls are definitely postured as environmentally unsound and destructive to existing local economies where they are being built. It struck me as an odd clash of sentiments. 'Malls R Us' disappointed me with a real lack of information, or hypothesis, or presentation of an alternative. Why malls are closing, or going down-market in North America, really isn't explored beyond an insinuation that it is due to the rise of the big-box retailer. I'd like a more complete understanding of that trend. Yes, business migrated over a few decades from 'downtown' to the suburban malls, and now it is migrating from suburban malls to big box retail. It's hard not to pick up an insinuation that 'we consumers' should have spent our dollars in the downtown stores, and having failed to do that, we should spend them in the malls, rather than at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Staples. I've yet to see a creditable analysis as to what might be the practical basis for that sentiment. Perhaps the 10% or 15% saved is truly meaningful to those in that part of the economy where outgo and inflow are pretty much the same?

'Malls R Us' aligned malls with the values of 'conspicuous consumption'. I'm not sure that's fair. I'm old enough to remember 8 story Eaton's stores in downtowns; what preceded malls certainly promoted conspicuous consumption, as do the big box stores that follow. I would have liked much more information, to answer some of the questions I had and still have.

Edit: So, I just realized that length of 'Malls R Us' is shown as 78 mins; the presentation that I saw was squeezed down into a 58 or so minute slot. I hate when they do that.

Slyly Funny and Sharp Critique of Mall Cultures/Globalization

[jpahl · 10/10 · 3 August 2010]

I'm in the film (along with my son, Justin) as a critic of malls, so my review is hardly objective--but I hope still will have value. My role was to argue that malls are "sacred places" that can do spiritual damage to us and the environment if we don't pay attention to how they work (my role was based on the argument in my recent book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces: Putting God in Place).

That said, I'm delighted by how the film turned out in its full 78 minute version. Malls R Us deftly (and not unsympathetically) represents the intentions of mall developers, only to then skewer their (spiritual) pretensions on the petards of their own grandiose rationalizations. The images and interviews with the guys at dead malls.com are a clear counterweight to the argument by developers that malls are "eternal," or will go on forever, and the scene with developer Rubin Stahl at Cabela's is pure satire unfiltered by any commentary other than the developer's own words and actions. The film's second half also presents an important counter to easy Thomas Friedman like accounts of flat-earth globalization. The final scenes with developer Jerde and team imagining a mall based on the Tower of Babel for Dubai is theologically rich material that I simply couldn't resist commenting on--although the folly of the ambition nearly speaks for itself!

All in all, Helene Klodawsky's slyly funny voice-overs, and visually stunning depiction of both mall splendor and squalor, is well worth a watch. Be sure to see the full 78 minute version. As a previous reviewer notes,the short version was apparently chopped up pretty badly.

Neither informative nor entertaining

[Pafl · 2/10 · 11 October 2011]

The topic is too exciting to deserve the treatment it gets. You learn very little about the macrodynamics of social processes that stand behind the mall phenomenon (and it's decline) and you also learn very little about the microlevel - how the mall environment works. The touch on developments in Asian countries is only very light, the conversations are staged with an extremely stiff acting (in a documentary - why?) and the "funny" element rests largely on ridiculing one of the mall developers, a certain Robyn somebody. The feeling of nostalghia for closed malls is not understandable to me. I think we really should try to keep these feelings for something or someone more important than a suburban commercial centre.