Reality Bites
Well this is the last movie I expected to ever exhaust me. It used to be one of my all time favourites (though we’re going back to when I’d probably only seen like 200 movies total lol), but it’s now years since I last saw it and within about 5 minutes I came to the realisation: though I’ve probably watched this movie dozens of times, I’ve probably never really watched it. That’s to say, I’m guessing I haven’t watched this at least since I left school, let alone college. And never has a movie so completely turned on me, I think – you become the characters here and suddenly you understand the dual meaning of the title – reality bites, like soundbites, very cool; but reality bites, like, reality bites. And it does. So I found myself getting really into the nostalgia of the energy of the cast and the soundtrack etc that first made me love the movie; but also suddenly finding all this other stuff hidden in the cracks that had just completely flown over my head those last dozens of viewings.
The good news is, if anything, this movie is even better than I remember it. The cast is about as young and fresh and energetic as it gets – I actually realised this time, again perhaps showing how long it is since I saw it, how it kinda resembles “Rent” in a lot of ways – albeit a shiny shiny, spoiled rich slacker version. It’s packed with quotable lines and scenes, and I was also reminded me of something I wrote about John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, made 10 years before, that it just kinda strikes me like this document that captures so much about the time it was made. The tagline on the poster couldn’t be more succinct – it’s a comedy about love in the nineties … and I love it.