Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?Unfortunately a lot of second rate actors are really really boring people, so an affirmative doesn't quite guarantee that you have a good movie on your hands, just that the raw material has been somewhat improved. Singles suggests a corollary question. I'd much rather see a doc of Cameron Crowe discussing his experiences in the Seattle music scene circa 1992 than this tedious collection of amateurishly performed drama class exercises he directed. How is it that Crowe got Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden to guest star, and Paul Westerberg to compose the score, but couldn't find one decent actor to prop up the sagging ensemble cast? One does not expect Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell to act circles around Matt Dillon, Bridget Fonda and Jeremy Piven, but there it is. Okay, so Bill Pullman is good in his 2 1/2 minutes of screen time, and there is an all-time great cameo (about 3 seconds long) by a then-unknown Paul Giamatti (with hair!) necking sloppy in a diner; I rank it up there with Richard Dreyfuss's cameo in The Graduate.
In sharp contrast, viewed 15 years on Reality Bites manages to avoid being embarrassing as a Gen X self-portrait. The same can't be said of The Big Chill, for instance, but that's probably because baby boomers are intrinsically embarrassing. Janeane Garofalo has always been sexier than she pretends, but here in her first starring role she is actually more vivacious than cynical (I still refuse to believe she did not voice Daria). Sadly Steve Zahn is wasted in a mild-mannered role, also his first.
Both of these flicks are pale cousins of Slacker.
Has there been one of these generation-defining movies lately? Should we be making one? Maybe it was Cloverfield.
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