07:32
Secret Mall Apartment. This was actually an indie documentary that was released, I don’t know, a year or so ago, and I have been waiting for it to come to a format where I could see it because it was on like the um festival circuit. I think it was at Sundance or something
07:49
like that. I’m not sure if it won any awards, but it had been around in terms of it being on my radar, and it is just my thing. First of all, it advertised itself as this group of young adults who move into the mall. They basically are located in Providence, Rhode Island. There’s this
08:14
big mall that opens up and they find these little pockets that are not used by retail spaces that um the mall is kind of this odd shape. So they’re like, “Well, this part is rounded, but the actual storefront is square. What happened to that curved piece? What’s
08:31
going on in there?” So they got into the back of the mall and shimmyed through all these super small crevices and basically found a large void that’s 750 ft. And in that void, they decided to build an apartment. I was intrigued, fascinated. I’m like, “How did they go
08:50
to the bathroom? Where did they get food? How did they move around after hours? How are they not seen on camera? All of these things came to my mind and I was really excited to get the answers. So, when I saw it drop on Netflix, I said to my son, “This will be something
09:06
a teenager might have fun with.” Because, you know, it is a little irreverent. It is a little um subversive to take a mall type space that’s meant for capitalism and retail marketing and all these different things and use it in a free way. And it was even more subversive than I thought
09:30
because as we started watching the story, in order to build the mall, they had to tear down a lot of housing. housing that was used by artists and people who um had limited income. And all of a sudden, these people were displaced by this big capitalist
09:48
behemoth. And these artists, I didn’t realize at the time that they were artists, but this group of artists, a lot of them from Risy, which is right by Providence, Rhode Island, were reclaiming this area as their home, but doing it in this way. However, I found
10:06
it to be very um well, let’s just call it false false advertising because they didn’t actually live there. These pockets that they found, including this very large 750 ft pocket, were not heated or cooled. They also didn’t have any windows, so it was very hard to
10:24
actually live there. The most time they ever spent there in 4 years was 4 days straight. In fact, usually they just used it as a place to meet or convene, almost like an artist salon, where they would talk about future artistic projects. They would talk about how to
10:43
make this apartment a little bit more of a scene in terms of the best ways to bring up furniture, the best ways to kind of get electricity to the space, the best ways to invite other people to the space while still being relatively incognito. but nobody actually lived there. So for
11:01
me that was kind of a bummer. And they showed so much about sort of the idea behind the space. They showed a lot about how the sort of ring leader Michael who was also a teacher at Risie and then he looped in some of his most um dedicated students and they lived here
11:21
with him because it was eight artists who wound up really claiming the space as their own and having keys to the space. So anyway, they showed his other works and other subversive kind of art installations he created out of public spaces that weren’t being fully used. In
11:39
other words, under a bridge, he wound up making a huge installation with these mannequins and nets and really finding public spaces that were underutilized and turning them into private spaces. And then also he did a lot of work with painters tape and making temporary
11:60
installations and murals in hospitals and other things that actually granted him access schools with the painters tape. So they spent a lot of time on his other artistic initiatives and really for my taste and for my son’s taste, not enough time on the actual logistics of
12:20
the mall. Sure, we learned like how they got into the mall, how they got out of the mall, but it was really that daytoday that we were seeking. It was that sort of um how do they not get caught by the cameras? How do they not get caught by security guards? And there
12:37
was a touch of that, but I really wish they would have gone deeper. I really wish that they were actually living and sleeping there versus just kind of using it as a gathering spot because even secret mall apartment leads you to believe that it is someone’s apartment.
13:00
Was it worth watching? It is highly critically acclaimed on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 98% tomato meter score. That’s pretty impressive. For me, it was somewhat slowm moving. For me, the focus was more on this Michael Townsen person and sort of his artistic philosophy and less on the
13:26
actual and for me more compelling promise, which is this is going to be all the details of the apartment. One thing I thought was a little bit kooky is because they could no longer access that apartment once they get kicked out. And I won’t reveal any more spoilers,
13:43
but they did eventually get kicked out after 4 years inhabiting this space for the documentary. They built out a fake space. So, they replicated the mall apartment as much as possible. Um, they tried to recreate the cinder blocks out of foam. They tried to recreate the
14:03
furniture, all these different things for the film and then they recreated some scenes of things that they had done in there. That was not a successful piece for me. These guys are obviously not actors. They are artists. So, as they were doing the
14:21
recreations, it felt somewhat cheesy. It felt contrived. I would have maybe liked to hear from the security guard’s point of view or