Kevin Smith followed Clerks with actual Miramax money, a whole mall, and Stan Lee, and thirty years later the result still splits every room it enters. Mallrats (1995) is Steve's pick, and he is not casual about it. He grabbed the VHS off a Blockbuster shelf around '96 purely because the cover art looked like a Star Wars poster, went straight from there into the rest of Smith's filmography, and dressed as Silent Bob for two different Halloweens in college, beard and wig and coat, pantomiming smoking weed and falling asleep if anyone asked him where Jay was.

Nic had never seen it. He's on record as not a Smith guy, and about halfway through the movie his wife Jeanie grabbed his leg and told him that for his own health he wasn't allowed to watch any more Kevin Smith films for a while. He says he spent the runtime feeling like Ethan Suplee in front of the Magic Eye poster, standing there unable to see what everyone else claimed was right in front of him. Fair warning: this ends up being the widest the two of them have ever landed apart, and it isn't close.

Which somehow doesn't stop it from being a great hang. They agree Shannen Doherty handles Smith's dialogue better than anybody else in the cast. Nic clocks Ben Affleck's enormous suit as the look of a Talking Heads cover band frontman. Steve has the entire DVD commentary loaded and ready, including the story of a network cropping a Coca-Cola cup out of a scene over a Pepsi deal, and the delicious fact that William Atherton passed on this as beneath him and then went and made Bio-Dome. There's a tangent about Magic Eye books as the official Christmas gift of relatives who don't really love you, a full defense of the stinkpalm as a small price to pay for the smiting of one's enemies, and genuine admiration for Brodie's ruling that the cookie stand is an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking.

Steve says Kevin Smith makes movies you either love or hate, with almost nobody stuck in the middle. Exhibit A was sitting right across the table.

Nic's wife Jeanie has seen A Few Good Men at least ten times all the way through, and she stops for it every single time it turns up on television, so when she leaned on Nic to make it his pick, he made it his pick. She also came along for the ride, becoming the first guest in the history of the show, and she immediately proved her worth by lodging a formal complaint about Tom Cruise eating an apple during a work meeting. Finish your apple before your interview. It's not complicated.

Nic caught the 1992 Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin courtroom machine in bits and pieces on cable in high school, back when an R-rated movie could air on TNT forever. Steve, a former stage actor and an unapologetic Sorkin guy who will tell you The American President is the best thing the man ever wrote, was thrilled to be made to watch it. He also shows up with a theory: Danny Caffey is just a nerdier Pete Mitchell, another Tom Cruise character with a dead, celebrated father whose exact job he now holds. Steve looked hard for a third example and came up empty.

From there it's the small stuff, which is the good stuff. Steve declares Cruise's softball swing dogshit and can tell from the mechanics alone that nobody's dad ever screamed at him on a Little League field. Nic wonders whether the Marine Silent Drill Platoon is a waste of a guy who could be doing something more useful, and gets briskly corrected about which branch he's actually thinking of. There's a run at "hella not guilty" as a legal strategy, a demand to see the line item for how much the military spends on custom yellow tape, and a three-way pile-on about the line where Jo explains that Marines stand on the wall so nothing's going to hurt you today. Nobody in the room can stand it.

Nic figures the whole thing should have ended with the cast holding hands and bowing. Steve has a word for that. It's a curtain call.

Steve didn't fall in love with So I Married an Axe Murderer so much as marry into it. He caught the 1993 Mike Myers comedy in high school, thought "that wasn't bad," and moved on. Then he met his wife, who'd spent years trading quotes from it with her dad, and suddenly the whole thing landed. Two decades later, "negatory, good buddy" and "we've got a piper doon" are load-bearing phrases in his house. So yes, this one's Steve's pick. Nic shows up as a guy who knew every joke and had somehow never seen the ending, a casualty of what he calls the pregame movie, the thing playing while everybody gets ready to go out.

What they get is a tour of a San Francisco that no longer exists. Nic identifies Roads Cafe as the real-life Vesuvio in North Beach and pegs the crowd as the Gen X version of the Foot Clan lair from the Ninja Turtles movie, all skate ramps and free cigarette machines. Steve is certain these people and the people in Singles would have hated each other on sight, and separately declares the cappuccino tracking shot the second-greatest follow shot in cinema history, behind only Henry and Karen walking into the Copa.

Then the nitpicking, which is most of the fun. Steve cannot let go of the Band-Aid on Nancy Travis's finger, present in every scene, explained never. Nic diagnoses Myers's haircut as a pumpkin pie minus one slice, and objects to the "hello" bit on the grounds that he already has a hello guy in his life and it's Steve. Charlie dumped a woman for smelling exactly like vegetable soup, which triggers a full referendum on which soups a person could acceptably smell like. Nic clocks the honeymoon resort's name, Poet's Corner, as a neighborhood in Pleasant Hill. Steve gears up to nail the film on Bay Area geography and comes up empty, which visibly wounds him.

Plus Phil Hartman as Vicky, Charles Grodin politely declining to have his vehicle commandeered, and a rigorous physics debate about surviving a rooftop hatchet fight after taking one in the nuts.

Some movies you love on sight. Some you marry into.