Ordinary Strangeness

For Ally--(and don’t take it personally if you really like this movie)

So I read your post and, in a complete time-I-will-never-get-back coincidence, Reality Bites was on HBO tonight after I watched my 24 recording.  So, on the front end of this, I concede any high ground that may be in question.  Anyhow, everybody had gone to bed, I had half a beer left and had just finished Bauer-Hour.  So I watched it, figuring it was as relevant as anything else I would find on TV, and there was a chance that I had some buried memories that watching it would unearth. Which it didn’t, but no surprise there: the 90′s were rough.

Here are a few sage observations that came out of that experience:

Ethan Hawke, icon of a short, meaningless period in film history: The fact that the goober that is Ethan Hawke’s character could EVER have been reasonably acceptable to a paying audience is astounding, almost as astounding as the groovy hair and hipster drag he was wearing.  It would have been much more believable if he’d gotten his ass kicked midway through the movie.  He earned it.

Winona Ryder: that she pays her bills by scamming her dad’s gas card was a precursor to both our current credit crisis and her penchant  for borrowing things that didn’t belong to her.  Or stuffing them in her purse.  But to hell with all that:  she deserves respect for her waifish sexiness, and she isn’t a bad actor–at least, not a bad actor in the dramatic sense.  But she doesn’t seem to find her way on to movies sets any more.  Maybe they’re worried about her stealing the slate or a camera or something.  Still, she deserves a break, maybe one that lands her in prime time.  It worked for Charlie Sheen, it works for Keifer Sutherland, why not Wynona?  Just stay away from the folks at CSI.

Parents: just never understand, that’s why we have movies like this.  Which is a very good reason to be pissed off at them.

AIDS: Whatever happened to middle-class white kids being worried about AIDS?  That and nuclear war: clearly no longer problems.

Soundtracks: They are rarely strong enough to carry a movie.  Possible exceptions:  The Graduate; Harold & Maude; Garden State

Irrelevance: The movie gets at best one thumb up, but only for giving us a rose-tinted snapshot of youth and for keeping the bar low for good coming-of-age movies.  Its a genre that needs to maintain some relatively-low standards to ensure youth is still accessible to the low-brow masses.  This one suits its “Gen X” audience just fine, treating them fairly as the meaningless, incoherent assemblage of same-aged people that they are.  For me, Dazed and Confused hits the same notes with a little more of a groove.  At least the 70′s gave the writers some common ground for the characters:  drinking, fighting, and sex, all of which make for good stories, and all of which Reality Bites trades for emotional bubblegum, bad music, and the Gap.

Ben Stiller: Directed it and acted in it, I didn’t remember that, not sure I should have.  It starred him, Ethan Hawke, Wynona, Renee Zellweger (her first film appearance), Evan Dando (The Lemonheads), and Janeane Garafalo, and a few other bit parts from today’s familiar faces.  Noticeably absent:  Kevin Bacon.

Writing about this movie: took something valuable from my soul.  Time, lost forever.

After it was over: I immediately had a craving to watch Singles.