Reality bites (2 Viewers)

Ambreen

Sordide Sentimental
Last night, I saw that movie, which is Ben Stiller's first one.

reality_bites.jpg


Trailer : http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=8632

A film about four friends having graduated and discovering the hard reality of adult life, mostly focusing on their love and job concerns. A fine and funny depiction of what is called Generation X. Winona Ryder is as a good actress as usual but being a girl (:D), I was particularly seduced by Ethan Hawkes' character. You know, he plays the brilliant and sexy guy who left his philosophy studies while he was to finish them and then lives his life as he likes, answering to criticisms with cynical and witty formulas that only he knows how to make. One day, he's fired of the kiosk he was working in because he's caught stealing a Snickers chocolate bar and he justifies himself to his friends by pretending the Establishement owed him a Snickers... great ! :D

Now I'm waiting for Ben to do the same with Generation Y (I've checked, that exists, it refers to my own generation) and then with Generation Z (I've checked, that exists...my new existential question is : what will they name the next one ?).

Good without being the film of the century. I've actually created a thread because I got hooked by one of the soudtrack's songs and wonder if anybody can help me to identify it. It 's the song you can hear at the end of the trailer. I've found a video of the whole scene :
http://it.truveo.com/Génération-90-extrait/id/72057637249913799

Thanks !
 
Thank you Roni ! I didn't expect such a quick answer !
...I didn't hear "Sharona" but..."surrender" :D

I really like it :D
 
Thanks for the link Socratease, funny story !

Was it a good band ?

I've just read the wiki page about that song and have discovered it's one of Dave Grohl's favourite songs, yeah !

A french parody :
[This video is unavailable.]
(Mickael Youn is a french comic actor who doesn't make me laugh. "Comme des connards" means "Like assholes").
 
Now I'm waiting for Ben to do the same with Generation Y (I've checked, that exists, it refers to my own generation) and then with Generation Z (I've checked, that exists...my new existential question is : what will they name the next one ?).

Fred
 
If you like 'My Sharona' you'll probably like


and

[This video is unavailable.]

and

[This video is unavailable.]

and


and



oh and Ethan Hawke is an underrated actor
 
Thanks to both of you for your suggestions ! I listened to them while reading the forums but none of them hooked me as My Sharona did. And as for this latter, I think that it's more a temporary cruch that anything else :D The kind of song that remains several days/weeks in your head before progressively vanishing.
 
I like Reality Bites, seems oddly familiar with "our times." I work but I certainly am not using my degree in English (that I'll still be paying for until I'm 55). What will a movie that depicts my generation of 20 something college graduates look like..I know it'll probably take place in the unemployment line! If you like that movie, you might like one called Threesome. Its a little harder to find but I think much better.
 
The funny thing about that Gen X label is that it was meant for those born in and around 1961 not 71.
The X is being at the end of the boomers, so those unlucky enough to be born around 1961 are faced with an entire wave of people filling jobs with no real hope of advancement unitl the boomeers retire around 2010-die fuckers. I want my mine
JOKES ON ME AND MINE THOUGH The economy the way it is-the boomers are staying in the work force longer.
Boom Bust Echo Kaboom
 
The funny thing about that Gen X label is that it was meant for those born in and around 1961 not 71.
"Gen X" extends to 1980 if I'm not mistaken. But that's all pretty vague, since the baby boom started when the survivors of World War II staggered home in late 1945, starting the baby boom in 1946. So their kids (gen X) wouldn't start being born until the mid 1960's. If a generation is 20 years, gen X should probably go 1964 - 1984. So if you have vague memories of seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, or an adolescent fear of being drafted into the Vietnam war, you are not gen X.

I think the only reason anyone felt the need to quantify that generation is because they were the first really selfish generation in memory. They had the money and the freedom to gaze at their navels with much more intensity than any generation that came before them. They were the beginning of the downfall of the ideals that built the country, you might say. Can you imagine them stumbling over themselves to rush to a war in another country the way their parents did? They wouldn't. That World War II generation was the last to do that. Even the pre-baby boom generation (the hippies) wouldn't. Though they were subject to being drafted and involuntarily sent to Vietnam to die.

By the way, Reality Bites is only Ben Stiller's first movie if you don't count the 10 movies he was in before that. And the dozens of TV appearances and stint on Saturday Night Live.

Like a lot of things from the early 90's the movie doesn't really stand the test of time (unless is it now nostaligia for you). Watching it now you just want to slap all those angsty pomo slackers (the dancing to My Sharona is "ironic," in case you didn't catch that) and tell them to shut the fuck up. At least that was my initial reaction when I caught half an hour of it on HBO a few weeks ago.
 
By the way, Reality Bites is only Ben Stiller's first movie if you don't count the 10 movies he was in before that. And the dozens of TV appearances and stint on Saturday Night Live.
Ben Stiller's first film > the first film Ben Stiller directed.
Is it clear enough or do you need further details ?
Sorry sir, but the point is for me !

Ben Stiller was in Christian Bale's first movie Empire of the Sun in 1987.
I understand "Christian Bale's first movie" as "the first movie Christian Bale directed" ;)

Watching it now you just want to slap all those angsty pomo slackers (the dancing to My Sharona is "ironic," in case you didn't catch that) and tell them to shut the fuck up. At least that was my initial reaction when I caught half an hour of it on HBO a few weeks ago.
You're talking like an old goat.

I like Reality Bites, seems oddly familiar with "our times." I work but I certainly am not using my degree in English (that I'll still be paying for until I'm 55). What will a movie that depicts my generation of 20 something college graduates look like..I know it'll probably take place in the unemployment line! If you like that movie, you might like one called Threesome. Its a little harder to find but I think much better.
Very true ! If I liked this movie, it's because I recognized my own interrogations and worries through the characters ones. I will finish my internship in a week, my studies in three weeks, then do a new internship during summer and then, the unknown. Not sure to find a job, but above all, not sure to find a job corresponding to my skills and to my ideals. It seems to make no sense.
I never saw Threesome (whose french title is so less crude :D), but I remember that when I still had a tv, it was regularly broadcasted here.
 
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i was too slow. have written before reading the previous post.




i guess she meant it was the first movie directed by Stiller.


Think I remember a punk-band named 'Generation X' in the early 80s.

but as far as I know, the first time, 'the media' used it for a certain type, it WAS those, who were 20-somethings in the early 90s.

I don't remember if it was in that book by Douglas Coupland or in one of those media-hype articles, but one sort of 'definition' for Generation X, I've read, was: "The First generation that has it WORSE than the one before." (I think in the appendix of his book, one of the census-questions was about that.)


In the early 90s, when that hype hit Europe, I first thought:
This 'Generation X'-hype is a made-up-thing by the media to sell through this new, hip label, a fake, a bogus.
At least (I thought) it would be an American phenomenon that cannot be transfered to 'our' lifes in Europe.

Then I saw this movie in the theatres - and suddenly realized:
There IS a Generation X AND it IS My generation!
(that was, when I was working in film business - TV-commertials to be exact, and read a lot and had just bought my first vidcam. so, of course I was sympathizing with some of the characters. And of course Ethan Hawke was 'the hero'.)



No need to forgive me, for I have sinned:
I loved that movie and I still do.



And yes, that 'My Sharona'-scene Was ironic. The 90s Were the decade of irony, and the 20sth's during the 90s were THE generation of irony - out of despair.
(there are several scenes in the movie to show this.)
 
I don't remember if it was in that book by Douglas Coupland or in one of those media-hype articles, but one sort of 'definition' for Generation X, I've read, was: "The First generation that has it WORSE than the one before."
I would be interested to know how anyone came to that conclusion. Unless not being able to decide what to do with your college education while you sit in your parent's basement sucking on a bong and watching Beavis and Butthead is somehow worse than being shipped to Vietnam, Iwo Jima or the beach at Normandy.
 
[...] sit in your parent's basement sucking on a bong [...] is somehow worse than being shipped to Vietnam ...

i guess, what they were refering to, was not the problem with some wars (besides: the very same generation that was "shipped to Vietnam" was totally fond of sucking on, well, maybe not a bong, but the pot-equivalent of the time).

i'm not really here to defend that ('generationX'-)statement, but want to note:

in terms of common/general welfare, we do see, there's been a progress from the 40s to the 50s to the 60s, (a little problem with the Arab's oil during the 70s) and a lot of flying-high-through-the-rooftop during the 80s, the latter of which being mostly financed by heads-of-states like Reagan (in the US) or Kohl (in Germany) by building a huge mountain of debts, which now screw those nations (on the shoulders of the poor - which grew more + more from then to here).

the 90s were the beginning of, when even the major public couldn't close their beautiful eyes anymore and had to admit, that times got harder.

"When the bagboy holds a college-degree" - that's a statement, you wouldn't 've read in the 80s or before.


but what am i talking politics here?
sorry!

bygones.
 
I suppose hard times are subjective.

I didn't go to college (and barely finished high school - I started working full time when I was 17), but any time I've wanted to work in the past 32 years I have been able to. If you listen to the news reports these days you would think there are crowds of people shuffling aimlessly in block-long breadlines and dropping dead from starvation at the sides of the roads by the hundreds of thousands, and that just isn't happening. I'm not dismissing or minimizing anyone's pain and suffering if they've been put out of work recently, but it has been a lot worse in this country's history, many times.

I'm trying to hire support staff right now and I can't find qualified people. Or when I do, they hold out for some unrealistic starting wage that might have been common in 1999 - during the champagne and $1500 chair days of the internet biz when specific web talent was rare - but those days are long gone. I'm offering people $40k (with the potential to make considerably more once they really learn the job - and we're talking about months to learn the job, not years) and they are turning their noses up at it.

Three weeks ago I received this in reply to an ad on craigslist.org:

Your requirements compared to salary are a joke. It's f-ing LA, how do you expect people to live on this? You want some ghetto hood rat? No? well then pay more than a hood rat makes. What a jackass....

So in my experience, here in one of the largest cities in the world, the jobs and the money are there, but people are still choosing to wait for more. If the doomsayers were to be believed I would have people lining up outside the door underbidding each other like some kind of high tech Home Depot parking lot mob scene.

None of that has anything to do with the horrible suffering of gen X though, so forget I said anything.
 
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I'm not dismissing or minimizing anyone's pain and suffering if they've been put out of work recently

Indeed even in a recession there are always jobs, only these jobs are menial jobs that a great deal of people will turn up their noses at. The problem is those who are willing to do these jobs yet are overqualified often get rejected because when you have a degree employers assume you won't stick around, so they won't hire you. In order to get a job this year I had to remove most of my academic qualifications. So in a sense my CV (resume) represented a lesser applicant, yet it fitted what the employer was looking for.
 

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