Reality Bites (10th Anniversary Edition)
by Ben Stiller
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Actor: Ben Stiller, Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, Steve Zahn, Winona RyderDirector: Ben Stiller
Brand: Universal Studios
Producer: Bill Finnegan
Producer: Danny DeVito
Producer: Lori-Etta Taub
Producer: Michael Shamberg
Producer: Sheldon Pinchuk
Producer: Stacey Sher
Writer: Helen Childress
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-06-08
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Reality Bites (10th Anniversary Edition)
DVD Review: a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes
Summary: 4 Stars
[Reality Bites] is the story of four students who graduate and find themselves facing, well, reality. Troy Dyer [Ethan Hawke] is an intelligent but shiftless slacker. He plays in a band, but other than that, can't hold down a job to save his life. He has a thing for Lelaina Pierce [Winona Ryder] but the two fight the inevitable, afraid of commitment, or afraid that their friendship will suffer. Lelaina has a good job at a local TV morning show, but she hates it. She astutely judges it to be insipid, but on top of that, they won't give her documentary a chance. She lives with her friend Vickie Miner (Janeane Garofalo) who works at The Gap, and is promoted to manager. Her love life is a series of one-night stands that she ends before they can dump her, a pre-emptive strike. She worries that she has AIDS; meanwhile gay friend Sammy Gray (Steve Zahn) doesn't have that worry because he is celibate, too uptight about telling his parents to get involved with anyone. Troy, ever the slacker, starts sleeping on Lelaina and Vickie's couch--just for a while so he can get a job and pay rent somewhere--in your dreams.
Vickie Miner: Welcome to the Maxi Pad.
Ben Stiller directs this movie and he also plays yuppie Michael Grates, whose name was chosen because his character grates, though he is charming, in a cheesy, feckless way.
Lelaina: He's so cheesy; I can't watch him without crackers.
Not sure if that quote was about Michael, but anyway, he meets Lelaina when she throws a cigarette into his car while he is talking on his cell. The resulting crash throws them together, much to Troy's chagrin. When Michael starts coming around to "The Maxi Pad" to see Lelaina, he has to put up with Troy glaring at him from the couch.
Michael Grates: Have I stepped over some line in the sands of coolness with you? Because excuse me if somebody doesn't know the secret handshake with you.
Troy Dyer: There's no secret handshake. There's an IQ prerequisite, but there's no secret handshake.
The best Dyer/Grates confrontation is one where Michael struggles to compare him to the character of Yorrick the Jester in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Hamlet: "Alas, poor Yorrick. I knew him, Horatio."
Michael makes a fool of himself, clearly out of his league with wishing there was another Troy to burn. The best he can muster is "you sit back there in clever-clever land..." Actually kind of a good pun and also an allusion to Peter Pan, insinuating that Troy is refusing to grow up and face reality. However, Michael has the last laugh here, because he, unlike Troy, knows that he loves Lelaina and commitment is the least of his fears. Later on, Troy scores with this dismissal of his rival:
Troy Dyer: He's the reason Cliffs Notes were invented.
[Reality Bites] opens with a college graduation, but throughout cuts back and forth between Reality and video bites of that reality being documented by Leilana Pierce (Winona Ryder). She is the valedictorian of her class, but in her speech, she has all the questions facing her generation, but her only answer is "I don't know." The film, and also the documentary she is working on, try to answer the questions, too.
[Reality Bites] encapsulates an era, it kind of sums up the whole Generation X zeitgeist, and it also boasts probably the best roles of their respective careers for both Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. The characters those two play in Reality Bites are, like the actors themselves, very talented, yet frustrating in their refusal to "live up to their potential."
And the film itself didn't live up to its potential at the box office either. It cost about 11 million, but grossed only about 18 million. Not a total flop, but not what they had hoped for either. Yet, in retrospect, the film's achievement is that it did capture the mood of that era, and showed the angst of Generation X.
Troy Dyer: [On answering machine] "At the beep please leave your name, number and a brief justification for the ontological necessity of modern man's existential dilemma and we'll get back to you."
Ironically, though it snaps an accurate Polaroid of Generation X, the studios didn't want to market it as such, and avoided mentioning the Gen X-ness of it all as if it was a diagnosis of AIDS.
[Reality Bites] was based on a screenplay Helen Childress wrote in 1990 called Blue By You, Helen was hired by producer Michael Shamberg to write a film about people in their twenties. For three years she wrote and rewrote Reality Bites, generating 70 different drafts. Childress used her friends, their personalities and experiences as the basis for her film, even secretly tape-recording conversations. She took the name Troy Dyer from a childhood friend who would later try to sue her. Ben Stiller signed on to direct in 1992 and worked for many months with Childress to develop the screenplay. The script was initially turned down by all the Hollywood studios because it tried to capture the Generation X market like [Singles] and that film flopped at the box office.
After completing several period pieces, Winona Ryder was drawn to [Reality Bites] because she was looking "for something a little more contemporary because I really wanted to wear blue jeans for a change." After reading the script in one sitting she "found it very true to life." She went on to speculate, "I think my character is very close to what I would probably have ended up as if I hadn't become an actress."
Charlie Sheen said this of Winona: "She was a sweet girl, but when she grew up I started to have a crush on her which lasts to this day. I also chose her film name. She was known as Horowitz and I said she should change it. We were listening to a lot of Doors music, including the tracks Riders On The Storm, and I said she should change her name to Rider with a Y. The next thing, she's Winona Ryder. No one believes me, but that's the truth."
The movie is pretty entertaining, as a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, love triangle, but it was also prescient about the coming rise of reality shows, and the ubiquitous product placement that would soon become the norm. It hit the nail squarely on the head with a great scene that skewers the habit of Gen Xers to overuse the word "Irony" while completely lacking a clue as to its definition. Of course, overeducated Troy does know the definition of irony, but he is one of the chief violators when it comes to indiscriminate product placement. It is hard for him to open his mouth without mentioning a product:
Troy Dyer: There's no point to any of this. It's all just a... a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know... a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle... and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.
But ultimately, Reality Bites manages to take the crass commercialism, the hopeful optimism, and all the yearning for something better, of a generation in a unique place and time, and like Troy, make it into poetry.
TEN ESSENTIAL FILMS OF WINONA RYDER BESIDES REALITY BITES:
Beetlejuice (1988) Winona played Lydia along with an over-the-top Michael Keaton in the title role.
Heathers - 20th High School Reunion Edition (1989) Winona played Veronica Sawyer in this classic comedy. Says Winona: "It's a brilliant piece of literature, and I call it literature because it really is. I held it up next to 'Catcher in the Rye' and all the great books that I've read."
Great Balls of Fire! (1989) Winona plays child bride Myra Gale Brown with Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis.
Mermaids (1990) Winona was Charlotte Flax, Christina Ricci was little sister Kate, and Cher played the unconventional mom. When Winona was asked why she always played teenagers, during a press junket for Mermaids in 1990 she replied: "Like, I'm nineteen. What am I supposed to do, play a judge?!"
Edward Scissorhands (Widescreen Anniversary Edition) (1990) Winona Ryder played Kim, alongside Johnny Depp in the title role. They were an item for a while, and Johnny had "Winona Forever" tattooed. When forever came, he altered it to read "Wino Forever."
The Age of Innocence (1993) Winona played May Welland in this period piece directed by Martin Scorsese.
Little Women (Collector's Edition) (1994) Coming from Petaluma, Winona was really touched by the shocking abduction and murder of Polly Klaas, and she persuaded Universal Pictures to turn the February 1994 Los Angeles premiere of Reality Bites into a benefit for the Polly Klaas Foundation. She also had enough clout to see that Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" - Polly's favorite book - was made into Little Women, with Winona in the title role of Jo March and the film dedicated to Polly Hannah Klaas.
Alien Resurrection (1997) Winona played the part of Annalee Call. Is that like a booty call? Says Winona: "I couldn't hold my own against Sigourney Weaver and those special effects. I still don't know what I was doing in that movie. I look at it now and realize I really didn't belong. I'm just this little girl running around."
Girl, Interrupted (1999) Winona played troubled Susanna Kaysen, but was out crazed by Angelina Jolie. Winona says: "I read biographies of the greats, and they were so messed up that I thought I'd better mess myself up. But I couldn't. I'm too small."
A Scanner Darkly (2006) Winona plays Donna Hawthorne in this attempt to finally get a Philip K. Dick book on the screen with its integrity intact. The film also stars Robert Downey Jr. and Keanu Reeves, but everyone is rotoscopped so that they appear as animated cartoons. This was supposed to save money on special effects, but it flopped anyway. It might be an undiscovered classic, but I haven't been able to see it, either in a theater or on DVD. It disappeared without a trace, except that according to the Hollywood gossip, Keanu is now dating Winona. Can't you see them together? It is just so crazy that it just might work.
Description of Reality Bites (10th Anniversary Edition)
REALITY BITES 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITIO - DVD MovieBen Stiller's directorial debut was this sporadically successful twentysomething comedy that tries too hard to codify the generational experience of its young adult characters. Winona Ryder plays a still-unformed woman struggling with career and relationship issues, Janeane Garofalo portrays her best friend, and Ethan Hawke and Stiller play the two lovers pursuing her. The story is as also about generation-X confusion over how to get by in a hand-me-down world with not much to get excited about, a world filled with a pop culture currency of bad music and poetry slams. The film's chief strength is its appealing cast, which is bolstered by appearances from David Spade, Renee Zellweger, Kevin Pollak, Jeanne Triplehorn, and Stiller's mother, Anne Meara. --Tom Keogh
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