Way back in 1994, Ben Stiller (looking really young) made his directing début with Reality Bites, starring alongside Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. This is one of the films of Generation X – the DVD case synopsis bills it as a romantic comedy. There’s a kind of love story and there are some great lines but this isn’t Richard Curtis. If it is a romantic comedy, it’s a postmodern one. Take out the Gen X pretentiousness, superiority and witty irony, though, and you’ve the classic love triangle of a girl trying to choose between the good guy and the bad guy.
There is a certain nostalgia to watching a film from the 90s but, in this case, it was more a nostalgia for the 90s America I watched on TV while I was growing up than for the 90s Dorset I grew up in! There’s a great scene where the main character’s serious documentary footage of her friends, as they search for their identity and a place in the system they’re trying to reject, gets cut and spliced into garishly coloured, superficial, spoon-feeding 90s reality TV that was spot on the kind of rubbish I remember watching on Sunday morning Channel 4!
For those who like TV connections trivia, there’s John Mahoney who played Frasier’s dad in Frasier and Janeane Garofalo, whose stint in series 7 of 24 antagonising Chloe was one of the few good things about that series. There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit part for Renée Zellweger before she was famous.
Plus, the credits roll to Stay by Lisa Loeb which is up there with the best of the (many) one-hit wonders of the 90s.
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