Reality Bites

I rented this movie knowing it wasn't really a comedy but a drama about the life of people in their early twenties in the 90's. What pushed me to rent it was the fact that many people qualified this film as horrible, but many other people loved this film and were talking about it like it was the most realistic thing ever.

Let's face it. I'm not going to pretend to know what it's like to be a teenager/young adult in the 90's since I was 9 years old when this movie came out. However, I think I have a good enough judgement to tell if this movie was realistic or not based on my personal experiences.

This movie isn't specially about the 90's, it's about "becoming an adult" and all it implies. It's about a cast of characters who hesitate between forever living what they were told is a pointless life [always having fun and bumming around] and becoming like the adults that they have criticized so much in their childhood. This, by itself, is very realistic, because it's a problem that many young people face even today. The main character Lalaina represents this fact completely. She's shooting a video of her friends as they struggle to find themselves in this world that was built by baby-boomers that they can't relate to. Also, she's a very clean-cut and hard working person, yet she hangs out with her friends who are more of the "rebellious" type.

This movie tries to represent the "alternative" crowd. Each character in this movie has an "alternative" as well as a "conformist" side, which is very strange. By example, you have a female character who wears vintage clothes and lives in a typical artsy room but works at the gap. This is another side of what was mentioning earlier. As young adults, they're straying away from the whole "alternative-ness" of their teenage years. This is something I've seen among people I know as well, and that I personally dislike. I guess it's something very typical of our era as well as the 90's.

What I found unrealistic in this movie was that the characters seem a bit cliché sometimes. Sure, I've seen people like that. But the personalities in the movie are too simplified. By example, there's the guy who always is slacking around doing nothing because he feels that having a full-time job until you retire is like wasting your life. Okay, but what else? What type of person is this guy, really? Also.. Each of the characters seem to act the way they do because they come from broken homes, which isn't very realistic in my opinion... The video that the main character has made is supposed to make their viewers know her friends and herself, but we don't really get to know them by watching the entire movie.

Overall, I thought it was an enjoyable movie. I liked the atmosphere of it. It also wasn't always predictable. I gave this movie a 7 because I liked it even though I disliked some of it's aspects.

Any film striving to chart the up-to-the-minute details of twenty-something life in 1994 was bound to feel a tad outdated the second that 1995 had found its cultural niche. And true, 'Reality Bites' was clearly trying so hard to be hip and with the times that there are points when its characters can seem very distant now (there can't be too many people today who'd consider dancing around a gas station like an unrestrained idiot to be a fitting definition of coolness – nowadays viewers will probably be more inclined to identify with the clerk looking on with bemusement in that scene). Nonetheless, the uncertainties that come with entering adulthood and establishing a steady independent life of your own in the real world will always be relevant issues to young people no matter what the era, so any flick that deals with them has a fair chance of striking a chord with such an audience (being a young twenty-something myself, they're certainly hot on my own mind). Sadly, they never amount to much more here than the backdrop for a familiar love triangle yarn, albeit the familiar love triangle yarn as you've never seen it before. Our lead girl still gets torn between two guys, each from a different rung on the social ladder, only this time round it's actually the down-to-earth businessman making a healthy living for himself (Michael) who's an amiable mass of benevolence, and the laid-back young musician struggling to make ends meet (Troy) who acts like an offhand, self-righteous bully for much of his screen time. That the film still expects our sympathies to lie in the usual places regardless and root for Troy simply because he's the underdog is just the slightest bit galling (let's ignore the fact that Leliana, the lucky heroine who has the honour of choosing between them, is something of a whiny, irresponsible brat herself). Perhaps the only thing more fatal than choosing to go with such a wearisome and predictable formula is using characters that don't even comfortably fit it.

Fortunately, 'Reality Bites' does have a number of small redeeming qualities which come along at just the right moments and may make us intermittently forget that this is all going to be part of something very hollow and routine overall. It's stylish, well-crafted and reasonably entertaining, if you can forgive the occasional patch of cringe-inducing dialogue ("I'm a non-practicing Jew" "Hey, I'm a non-practicing virgin" – dear lord), and Ben Stiller adds life and flair from whichever side of the camera he's on. His debut direction feels surprisingly accomplished, panning the various scenes from a selection of imaginative angles and connecting them together very smoothly, while his character is easily the most likable and understandable of the bunch (too bad he wasn't meant to be). John Mahoney (better known for his role as Martin Crane in the popular sitcom 'Frasier') has a memorable cameo as a disgruntled TV show host, the soundtrack is filled with lots of little audio treats, and the people in the prop department have certainly provided us with plenty of interesting things to look at – it's actually quite fun to watch if you keep your eye out for all the novelty memorabilia that these characters have hoarded; in addition to Michael's beloved Dr Zaius figurine, a Garfield-shaped telephone and a metal 'Charlie's Angels' lunch-box, among others, have made it to the set.

But what really hurts 'Reality Bites' in the end, other than the hackneyed storyline, is just how much depth and substance the protagonists are sorely lacking. Considering that it revolves around a recently-graduated girl determined to demonstrate that she and her friends are more than just shallow Generation X-ers, devoid of any desires that extend beyond having sex and eating pizza, it doesn't exactly do a great deal to convince us otherwise. Most of their time is seemingly devoted to nothing more ambitious than messing around and having spats with each other, while the more serious material, including a subplot which sees Leliana's best friend Vickie awaiting the results of a test for HIV, is downplayed so considerably that you never get the impression that any of them are terribly concerned. The back-stories we hear about rough childhoods of divorced or neglectful parents are equally perfunctory, and the sad fact that Troy's dad is currently dying from prostate cancer is treated very incidentally by the film as a whole - what little is made of it feels more like an emotional blackmail designed to make us feel sympathy for the pretentious Troy than an actual aspect of his character.

It gives us something good every now and then, but overall 'Reality Bites' just isn't strong or satisfying enough to qualify as a coming of age classic (don't even think about comparing it to 'the Graduate', or even 'Risky Business'). While it may go on being fondly-remembered by those who experienced it at the time, on the whole this one feels like it's been rather grounded in 1994, and left with only real claim to fame – and that's that it famously beat 'Pulp Fiction' to the rights to have 'My Sharona' on its soundtrack. With hindsight, it was probably 'Pulp Fiction' who had the last laugh.

Grade: B-

This movie is the 90's in all of it's 90 minutes, so if you're nostalgic then look no further. The film tells a familiar coming of age story: high school graduates become adults and figure out their futures aren't that bright. Every generation is passed on the world from their parents and they have to deal with it and the fact that they may even become their parents. This is that story in it's all it's angsty 90's glory and the film does it with some fair humor. Winona Ryder,Ben Stiller, Ethan Hawke, and Steve Zahn are your main players but a number of cameos are made from other 90's mainstays such as David Spade and Andy Dick. While the movie does risk becoming too campy at times, for the most part this is a dry and fairly sober look at what it meant to be a young adult trying to survive at that time.

I really enjoyed this movie. Looking back in hindsight, I can see the selfishness of the characters, and I have read the complaints about this, but isn't that kind of the whole point of the movie? It's about people talking about not "selling out" while at the same time they ARE "selling out" in many different ways. They (the characters in the movie) are all consumers who satirize the very idea of "consumerism" but refuse to "stoop down to the level" of getting menial jobs to try and pay the bills. The movie defines for me how education isn't everything and from my own experience I have learned that sometimes the "great dream" (of being a writer, artist, musician, etc.) just doesn't pay the bills and in order to make decent money one may have to go into a field that is not originally their first choice as a means of employment. I remember being young and wistful, with dreams of being an artist, only to have to "settle" for an office job to make ends meet.

The movie does express what life was like for me at the time. I was a naive student with dreams of producing great artistic work, but who learned that what is taught in college as "reality" is not really reality at all. College students are fed with lofty artistic statements and philosophies and are taught to analyze endless aspects of society, ideals, etc., and are taught that "knowledge and education are power" but are not taught that credibility and respect are things which must be earned and that very few people actually start out at the top of the career ladder.

Overall, this continues to be one of my favorite films and I appreciate the myriad of messages that it sends, though they may, at times, be contradictory.

The first time I reviewed "Reality Bites" I was 15, and I had missed much of the film's point, praising it without critique. The second time was after viewing the film again a year later, upon which I began to notice things that I had naively ignored, such as just what self-centred people the characters were. I re-reviewed it, this time with an overly negative response. It was not until my third watching, and third review, of the film that I returned to my initial opinion, this time with reasons rooted in aspects of the film it had taken me 2 years to spot.

Comedy star Ben Stiller is most well known for his comic portrayals of characters cursed with incredibly bad luck (see Meet the Parents, There's Something about Mary, Zoolander). His career as a director is not nearly as extensive as that of his acting, although he has appeared in every film he's directed. For those wondering, it all started in 1994, with romantic comedy "Reality Bites".

Winona Ryder plays Lelaina Pierce, a fresh-faced college graduate who works a frustrated job as assistant producer for a cheesy talk show, while in her own time she enjoys filming her friends Vicky (Janeane Garofalo), Sammy (Steve Zahn) and good-looking rebel Troy (Ethan Hawke) in an amateur documentary on the disenfranchised lives of Generation X called 'Reality Bites'. In a mild car accident she meets Michael (Stiller), a sweet-hearted businessman, and they begin a romantic relationship, from which sparks talk of taking her documentary to the commercial network Michael works for. Amidst this, tensions between Lelaina and Troy begin to rise as his feelings for her become clearer...

"Reality Bites" is the kind of film that is prone to misperception. The movie has an under-the-radar subtlety to it that was widely missed even by advocators of the film. While the characters are given sensitive treatment in the script and in performance, they are also portrayed with the hidden agenda of satirizing the generation they exemplify and the culture of that generation. On one level this is apparent: the constant 90's culture references, quotes such as Troy's response to promptings from Lelaina while documenting him: "I am not under any orders to make the world a better place". The more hidden layer of subtlety comes in the form of the film's general Hollywood treatment and product placement: the film makers chose a undeniably commercial approach to a subject that is widely presented as such (life and love in the 1990's), while the specific matters and characters in the movie were based around independent and "un-commercial" philosophy. This means the film is, by its very nature, ironic on more than one level.

Critics of the film were mostly irritated by the main characters' stereotypical personalities and subsequently found them to be boring. This misses another of the film's points: the characters are deliberately stereotypical and too often were the naïve and condescending opinions of these characters, namely Lelaina and Troy, mistaken for the morals of the film. "Reality Bites" doesn't believe that Lelaina is a genius documentarian, it doesn't believe that Troy is a brilliant and secretly reliable guy and it doesn't believe Michael deserves the rotten deal he gets. It just shows how this kind of cultural mentality plays out in practice.

That being said, one very straight-forward quality of the film is the acting performances. All four members of the lead cast do excellent jobs; they nail their characters with succinct accuracy. Ethan Hawke is the stand out performance, as the brooding and condescending Troy, a character most unlike any of the others he has played before or since. Ryder is at her best here, in a performance topped only by that of Girl, Interrupted. Stiller, too, delivers solidly, even if the role is very similar to others he has played.

"Reality Bites" may strike a resonate note of realism for members of Generation X, but that really isn't its ultimate goal. Essentially this is a film that doesn't necessarily wear its heart on its sleeve, but serves as moderately engaging entertainment of a slightly more insightful nature than others of its kind.