Rad or Bad? — Reality Bites
Reality Bites is a perfect movie. I’ll go ahead and spoil this whole thing for you and let you know that it’s rad. It has everything you want: peak Winona Ryder, tortured Ethan Hawke, and a perfect snapshot of what being 22 in the 90s was like…well before the late 90s WB boom.
Reality Bites is directed by Ben Stiller, and I feel like that’s a thing not enough people talk about. He also stars in it, and he’s perfectly fine, but I would’ve rather us been gifted Dodgeball or Heavyweights Ben Stiller instead of sedated Ben Stiller.
The movie was also shot by Emmanuel Lubezki who also shot Cat in the Hat…and The Revenant.
THE RADNESS
— Winona Ryder will never ever be better than she was as Lelaina. Some people think she’s better in Heathers, and that’s super okay to think, but I think she’s great in this because she had to be an actual normal person for once.
— The car scene where Ben Stiller and Winona Ryder are making out to “Baby I love Your Way,” and then Ethan Hawke walks by carrying his guitar and sees them and walks by all sad as shit. UGH GOD, you just want to give him a big hug and tell him it’s okay. He loves Winona, and he has to watch her be happy with someone else. Man.
— Janeane Garofalo is so good in this. Her side story about possibly having AIDS was scary and realistic for that time period. When she talks about how she can’t focus on anything because she’s scared that she has AIDS, you related to her. Maybe not because you have AIDS, but have you ever been stressed out about something and had to focus on something else? It’s impossible.
— “Pass the can………..man.”
— “What’s your glitch?”
— Not to be a mega douche, but the camera work in this movie is top notch.
— DAVID SPADE ALERT!!!!
THE BADNESS
— Ben Stiller polished Winona Ryder’s turd of a documentary. That’s a 100% fact that even holocaust deniers couldn’t contest.
— Ethan Hawke getting fired from his job for stealing a Snickers because he thought his company owed it to him is some next level fuckery.
— This movie isn’t nearly as deep as they want it to be.
— — —
We need to talk about Troy (Ethan Hawke’s character) for a second. We were all Troy at some point, vapid and empty and self indulgent, not able to look past ourselves because we thought everyone else was a mindless parody of what they thought was cool and we were the only ones being ourselves. We’ve all thought we were deeper than we were. We’ve all attempted poetry. Hell, I used to try and find deeper meanings in movies so that people would think I’m smart. Now I just wonder what Nic Cage’s dong was like in Face/Off and if it was anything like Travolta’s.
But, Troy sucks. He’s manipulative and slightly abusive. There’s no reason for Winona to have ended up with him and not Ben Stiller. Ben Stiller didn’t do anything wrong!
Those are minor gripes of an otherwise perfect movie. Sure, it’s not as deep as it wants to be, but then again, who is?
