Reality Bites

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.

Reality Bites is a movie I can currently relate with, as I have been recently suffering through post-college trauma. The movie has such a relatable premise, but I feel it could have been just a little better. But watching the movie provided me with the feeling that I am not alone in this ordeal. The movie was written pretty well and this is Ben Stiller's directorial debut, so a movie like this is not a bad way to begin a directing career.

Stiller's film is about a TV production assistant named Lelaina who is creating a documentary about post-grad life with her three friends: Troy who is a philosophical unemployed slacker, Vicki who is the manager of Gap, and Sammy who is trying to find his sexuality. When she meets Michael, an executive at an MTV-like studio, there is a chance her documentary can now go public.

The film is reasonably acted. Winona Ryder does a pretty good job as Lelaina, even if she seems a little whiny. I liked Ethan Hawke's character as his philosophy reminded of his character in the Before Sunrise series. Ben Stiller had a limited role, but he did a solid job. I also like Steve Zahn as the man trying to find out who he is.

Overall, Reality Bites is a decent movie because mainly it has a theme that people my age can relate to. The path to show this theme may not work as effective, but the movie was still mostly entertaining. I will say that the documentary shots got a little annoying at times, but the narrative itself is quite good.

My Grade: B

I really do have difficulty with the short shrift this film seems to get. Admittedly, Ethan Hawke's appaling "I'm nuthin'" doesn't really do the film any favours but that asides, Reality Bites always has me in tears. The basic storyline, centering on a love that both people know exist but due to circumstance and fear has not manifested is so universal, and so well done. The 'my life is falling apart' endless phone calls to the psychic 0900 number part is so tragi-comedic, and the entire movie is full of continuous great scenes. Admittedly, being a single 25 year old white male who originally saw the film a few years back, I was probably caught at the optimal time for it to have an emotional impact, but I find myself going back to it again and again. Winona has never been better, and Janeane Garofalo is stunning as the low self-esteem serial one night stander with the AIDS paranoia and over-full shag book. Also, great cameos from the Soul Asylum geezer and Evan Dando's stunning turn during the end credits add to the film. Overall a stunning film, admittedly which will probably only be appreciated by a relatively narrow demographic.

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.

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.