Reality Bites

Another of the movies that I recorded during one of the free preview weekends is Reality Bites. It's going to be on multiple times next week on various of the channels in the Cinemax package, starting Sunday morning at 11:30 AM on More Max.

The movie starts off with a video of Leilana (Winona Ryder) giving the valedictory at her college graduation, and then some more video of her and her friends in the "they think they're profound but they're not" way people that age do. Those friends are Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who sleeps around; Sammy (Steve Zahn), who eventually comes out of the closet as the movie's Token Gay Friend; and Troy (Ethan Hawke), a slacker musician who spends more time practicing with the band than looking for a job.

Leilana's rich but divorced parents (Swoosie Kurtz and Joe Don Baker) try to buy her off with Mom's old BMW and a gas card, which she reluctantly accepts until she can support herself better. For the meantime, she shares an apartment with Vickie, now working at the Gap, and gets a job with a morning show hosted by phony Grant (John Mahoney) while she can try to follow her dreams of becoming a documentarian.

One day while Leilana and Vickie are in their car, they get in a minor accident caused by Michael (Ben Stiller) who is too busy looking at a map and on his car phone (a big thing for the early 90s). Michael is a producer at a cable TV channel called In Your Face TV, which looks something like either a forerunner to Quibi, or Al Gore's unlamented Current TV. Perhaps Leilana might be able to get her documentary off the ground. At any rate, Michael decides it's love at first sight with Leilana.

This makes Troy jealous, as he realizes he's loved Leilana all along. He's not going to be able to do much for Leilana, however, as he's lost his job again, and resorts to sleeping on Leilana's couch. Leilana also loses her job because she stupidly feeds Grant a bunch of embarrassing questions. (Obviously, none of these people saw Tony Randall realize he was going to have to settle in No Down Payment, and that this is the ultimate reality for most of us.)

Much of the second half of Reality Bites deals with the love triangle between Leilana, Troy, and Michael, as she can't decide which of the two she wants to be with. Michael is ambiguous; it seemed to me unclear whether he was a good guy who just didn't get Leilana's dreams, or a selfish jerk who didn't care about them. Troy, on the other hand, couldn't be bothered to show up for a job interview that Leilana's father offered, which ought to be a major red flag, but Leilana instead makes excuses for him. Vickie has to take an AIDS test, while Sammy is largely written out of the movie.

Reality Bites is the sort of movie that ought to be right up my alley, as all the characters would have been born about the same year I was. But then, I didn't have the college experience they did or the post-college experience. It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one that I found frustrating as I just couldn't sympathize with many of the characters' motivations. At least they came across as more realistic than the people on Friends, however, which is a big plus.

There's an eclectic mix of music dating from then-current back to the 70s and before, something that I think reflects reality as I remember from my college days. While I didn't always care for the false profundity, I did like that the characters and their circumstances also seemed a lot more like real life not only than Friends as I mentioned above, but a lot of the other movies of people trying to make it in the big city.

Ultimately, Reality Bites is an interesting capsule of its time that doesn't always work, but does hit more than it misses. Reality Bites is still in print on both DVD and Blu-ray.