People were talking about Janeane Garofalo the other night, and it was that which put me in the mood to revisit Reality Bites, but - I must be honest here - when I last watched this film, somewhere in the latter part of high school (ie, probably about three or four years on from its 1994 release date), it was really all about Winona Ryder, my first movie star crush, and not one that I can find it in myself to feel any shame about at all.
I don't remember exactly where this film fit in with that particular story - after Heathers (which I'm fairly sure is where it all started) and possibly Edward Scissorhands but before Bram Stoker's Dracula, Beetlejuice, the Gillian Armstrong Little Women and How To Make An American Quilt I reckon (as to those last two, I can only plead a genuine cinematic crush) - but it was early on, at any rate. All wrapped up with that, too, and in some ways more significantly, Reality Bites was, for better or for worse, highly influential on me in terms of forming my ideas and hopes as to what grown up life would be like (the only other film to've had a similar influence on me at around that time was Love and Other Catastrophes, which I got to a bit later), at the very time when the then seemingly limitless potential of the world was just starting to open up for me (remember, dear reader, I was probably about 15 or 16 at the time).
...so, despite the eminent fashionability of sneering at this film for what might unkindly be characterised as its shallowness, its naivete, its lack of edge, I fully expected that revisiting it now would induce at least a twinge in me, not so much at its face value (though, let's be honest, some of that too), but for the nostalgia that it was likely to summon, for the 90s and for the time in my life when I first saw it, and that's just what it did; more than that, though, I was struck by how sweetly romantic it is, and if my receptiveness to that kind of tone is always going to fluctuate according to any number of factors (witness, in a different context, the see-sawing re: Garden State), well, I'm not troubled by that...and I think I've both realised and acknowledged that this one, Reality Bites, is an important signpost in my history, and so, so be it. I'm glad I've watched it again, now.
I don't remember exactly where this film fit in with that particular story - after Heathers (which I'm fairly sure is where it all started) and possibly Edward Scissorhands but before Bram Stoker's Dracula, Beetlejuice, the Gillian Armstrong Little Women and How To Make An American Quilt I reckon (as to those last two, I can only plead a genuine cinematic crush) - but it was early on, at any rate. All wrapped up with that, too, and in some ways more significantly, Reality Bites was, for better or for worse, highly influential on me in terms of forming my ideas and hopes as to what grown up life would be like (the only other film to've had a similar influence on me at around that time was Love and Other Catastrophes, which I got to a bit later), at the very time when the then seemingly limitless potential of the world was just starting to open up for me (remember, dear reader, I was probably about 15 or 16 at the time).
...so, despite the eminent fashionability of sneering at this film for what might unkindly be characterised as its shallowness, its naivete, its lack of edge, I fully expected that revisiting it now would induce at least a twinge in me, not so much at its face value (though, let's be honest, some of that too), but for the nostalgia that it was likely to summon, for the 90s and for the time in my life when I first saw it, and that's just what it did; more than that, though, I was struck by how sweetly romantic it is, and if my receptiveness to that kind of tone is always going to fluctuate according to any number of factors (witness, in a different context, the see-sawing re: Garden State), well, I'm not troubled by that...and I think I've both realised and acknowledged that this one, Reality Bites, is an important signpost in my history, and so, so be it. I'm glad I've watched it again, now.
