Sometimes we get into these deep, discursive conversations on Slack and I can’t even remember why we are having them. A whole day will go by and I’ll be thinking about a conversation and have to stop and ask myself: Wait, why did we even start discussing Currywurst, or Quantum Leap, or President William Howard Taft???
Today is one of those occasions. I was fairly sure I’d end up writing about a rare moment of pop cultural agreement and then I couldn’t find where the conversation even originated.
Was it another Slack room? A tweet? Did Adrian just make it up? I have no idea. But here’s where it all started:
So… why were we talking about this? I can find no record of me saying the film High Fidelity (which is great, go watch it) is the most Gen X thing, but I sort of stand by it. Everyone in the film is a Gen Xer, right? John Cusack, Jack Black, Tim Robbins. There’s a whole article that argues that High Fidelity is Gen X’s Annie Hall.
If you haven’t read the book or seen the film, High Fidelity is about Rob, a guy who runs a record shop right at the last moment in history where that can be a career. He’s not great at it, but it makes Rob cool, even though Rob is a dick to his girlfriend and to basically every woman he has ever dated. It is a premise that shouldn’t work, but the film, like the book, is just aware enough that Rob is kinda terrible and John Cusack plays it with so much charm. It was a breakout role for Jack Black and the whole thing works on repeated viewings.
As a Millennial I suppose the timing of it, however, makes it also a darling of my friends. And besides, there’s a way more Gen X movie:
This is not a unique view, but the Winona Ryder-led film Reality Bites is both extremely Gen X and extremely ’90s in a way that might even outdo Singles.
Here’s the Wikipedia description of the film:
Reality Bites is a 1994 American romantic comedy-drama film written by Helen Childress and directed by Ben Stiller in his feature directorial debut. It stars Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and Stiller, with supporting roles by Janeane Garofalo and Steve Zahn. In the film, Lelaina (Ryder), an aspiring videographer, works on a documentary about the disenchanted lives of her friends and roommates.
And here’s the trailer:
The trailer really plays up the Ethan Hawke v. Ben Stiller thing, which is helpful for this conversation. The idea is that Ethan Hawke is desirable because he’s cool and smart even though he doesn’t do anything except be a dick. Ben Stiller, on the other hand, has a job and goals so he’s bad, even though he’s trying to help Winona Ryder’s career.
This isn’t a unique view, btw, there’s a good “60 Songs That Explain The ’90s” episode about this.
BTW, here’s Janeane Garofalo saying it isn’t a Gen X movie:
Here’s some more talking about Blink 182:
Here’s Ethan Hawke singing “Add it up” by the Violent Femmes to Winona Ryder:
He can’t say fuck? He’s the cool guy but he can’t say fuck?
Ethan Hawke’s daughter is a nepobaby (as she acknowledges, her mom is Uma Thurman), I suppose, but she’s not bad:
She’ll say fuck, I bet.
All of this is old man talk, clearly, but it’s important to acknowledge that Ethan Hawke is the bad guy here, Ben Stiller is… maybe not the good guy, be he’s fine… and that Mercedes is going to be very strong.
wait I always thought Winona was the “badguy” of the film?
Lets face it, they all were horrible people
I’m very much a Gen-Xer. Saw Reality Bites when it came out in 1994 and thought Ethan Hawke was a prick. Saw it again a few years back and I still think his character is the bad guy and Ben Stiller was just trying to be a good guy.
And it really is the most Gen-X movie ever.
Also in this category (and also from the 90s): Rent. Wherein the “good” guys are drug addicts and losers who treat their significant others like shit, and the “bad” guy is the one with a job who just wants the “good” guys to actually pay their rent. What a monster!
Hell that is my GenX high school experience in a nut shell. Maybe that is a case for Reality Bites in and of it self as the GenX movie because it is true. In my experience, all the Winona Ryder’s in my High School (In Los Angeles) all gravitated to either jocks or drug addict losers who treated them like total shit. And in most cases, either got them knocked up, beat them or abused them emotionally. Then left them with baggage both in the form as kids and PTSD. I realized this after college when I returned to find them all very interested in me with my shinny new degree, nice car, good job and nice place to live. I guess in that case Winona choose Ethen Hawk he wasted her early 20’s, got her pregnant, had the baby and bailed on her, leaving her with her worn out hand me down BMW, a 3 year old and a job as a program manager at a local tech firm making 17 dollars an hour.
I would guess that the long stuck in development hell, shelved script for Reality Bites 2, showed her desperately looking for Ben Stiller to hook back up with him to get him to help raise Ethan’s kid and live happily ever after in Denver where he is Director at Arrow Electronics and living in Aurora.
I am genx and I loved Reality Bites when it came out and to be honest with you… I liked it because I, like most men my age, was totally hot for Winona Ryder. I didn’t really care as much about the film as I did about her.. and Since Ethan Hawke was a “Cool Guy” back then, and she was hot for him, I rooted for him not Ben Stiller.
Now as a middle aged man (be kind). I see Winona Ryder as the worst incarnation of Spock’s mom from a mediocre Star Trek movie and can look at Reality Bites with a fresh set of eyes.
it’s Meh.. I think both guys suck and she could do better.. but she was kind of annoying too. They all were. Sadly that means that we probably were pretty annoying too, just like my kids who are around that age now are…
As far as the most genx movie, Maybe Say Anything.. Maybe Singles, The Crow yes But for me… it was the Clerks for sure.. and to reinforce it, we have Clerks 2 and 3 which followed our generation from young adulthood to us now.. Kevin Smith in many ways is a pretty stable voice of Gen X
Ethan Hawke is the bad guy for stepping out on Uma Thurman.
As a genx person High Fidelity is not the most genx movie by a mile. For a start I’ve never even heard of it. Or of Reality Bites. Then there’s the breakfast club, footloose, back to the future, Clerks, gremlins, Wargames.
I just want to point out that the code is giving me 20% off, not 80% off – I would be paying 80% of the membership fee
Adrian is right, The Crow and Judgement Night both win based on their soundtracks alone.
Maybe it’s because I (and my wife) are “early” Gen Xers, but where are The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire in this discussion?
(Disclosure: I’ve never seen any of the other movies mentioned in the Slack…)
I consider Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds to be our generations unofficial anthem.
I also believe The Breakfast Club should be watched by any parents of teenagers, preferably with said teenagers.
Also… Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Hear, hear….
A song written for Billy Idol, who was the lead singer of Generation X.
I would argue, that appreciation of the John Hughes oeuvre is an essential part of any true Gen X-er, those are not really ‘Gen X’ defining movies.
Sorry I missed this conversation. For the record, the two most defining Gen X films both star Christian Slater: Heathers and Pump Up The Volume.
nm, ignore post
Well now I’m curious…
I’m trying to reach tech support. Last I heard, I was instructed to acquire a hammer and a thick slice of apricot Wensleydale to fix the issue. At least that’s what the voices in my head are saying. Mmm, cheese.
Last time I also needed a Squirrel and a top hat, but your mileage may vary.
Good luck.
Well, I’m doomed since I refuse to cooperate with…them. Fuzzy little fartknockers who keep eating my lawn furniture.
Cheese fixes most everything
Well, it at least took care of the hangry part.
You need a dog, preferably named Gromit.
I think that’s why the ‘lumps are around: they don’t eat my cheese.
Were you talking to Jason at the time?
Really there should be a class of late boomers and early GenXers. They really should have their own classification. So many changes and crap happening at that time
Its almost like arbitrary distinctions made on a continuous timeline aren’t very representative of reality………
I’m in a similar position on the GenX/Millennial boundary. I can remember the cold war (just), but I also had a mobile phone before I was an adult (just). At least people my age get a name ‘Xenials’
Man, most of my friends are Gen X and I gotta admit as the baby of the group…generational differences are nonsense. There are older-generation things I’ve picked up from having older parents that make sense, and I am also a large child who routinely calls things “mid.” There are commonalities to be had with pretty much anyone I’d meet.
The only real truth to life is that everything sucks. It may suck in different ways. It may suck in different forms. It may specifically suck in ways that affect you moreso than it sucks for your fellow man. Maybe there’s a larger classification to be had, where all of us post-Boomers blend together in one giant, ever-worsening pit of suck—but I doubt it. Things also sucked for them, too! I’ve heard about it! Uphill, both ways, from their sucky-sounding bootstraps or whatever. The generational labels feel like a distraction from the fact that everything is circling the drain and we’re all getting stuck with it. It all sucks. It really, really sucks.
I agree to some extent that the named generations don’t necessarily match common experiences, but anyone who graduated and tried to enter the workforce from 1987 to about 1992 had a way different experience than say someone in 1995 until 2000. Some years were just way more difficult to get an entry level job than others and if you graduated from college in 1988 you had a really tough time and you may still not have corrected for the slow start in things like take home pay and career advancement.
Fair, but there does seem to be an outsized emphasis on the dumbest things like “millennials are killing avocadoes” or whatever instead of like, “maybe cut the hoardes of people who graduated into a recession some slack for a change.” (And yeah, as a 2010 college grad, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make up the difference.)
Oh god, the “millennial kids don’t want to work anymore” bullshit is the worst. For many years I hired/managed interns and let me tell you no generation is better or worse than another – but there is huge variation in each individual – and you cannot predict which one is going to be hard working from their resume/application/interview. Things have not gotten worse or better with the young generations.
“Oh god, the “millennial kids don’t want to work anymore” bullshit is the worst.”
It’s not that they don’t want to work, it’s that they don’t want to work for FREE.
All those unpaid internships must be filled!!
I was born in may 61, so I call myself a space cadet
August 1964, I feel seen as the kids say
Yeesh, I can’t say I cared for any of those movies. High Fidelity was probably my least disliked film of those, but I couldn’t stand Cusack for years after that movie (until probably Con-Air, honestly). Singles and Reality Bites were just too much like real life (not so much in the story, but the characters reminded me of my older sister and some of her annoying friends).
I did rewatch The Crow a few years ago, and while I can’t say it held up super well, it at least didn’t remind me of the parts of the 90s I hated (high school and college). That was epecially true since the soundtrack to The Crow was great – I had it on both cassette and CD back when it came out.
There’s so many nineties movies with killer soundtracks.
This is really the most important lesson to take from all of this discussion.
Whatever my feelings about High Fidelity (loved it when I was in my 20s, I find it a bit mopey and pretentious now) it introduced me to “Old Sad Bastard” (Belle and Sebastian) which is still my go-to chill band.
So. Im fifty, and at my workplace I often dial up some music to listen to on our overhead system (mostly because I’m there first thing in the morning). I’ve recently been told that it’s called “Ansco’s Sad Bastard” music.
I mean, like half my coworkers are older than me but this is what I get? Was High Fidelity more popular than I realize?
Have I had one too many beers?
No love for Slacker? Slacker is the Austin that every oldish coot claims they moved to, but totally missed when they moved here to work at some tech company in 2008.
Signed,
It was 2012 in my case, bro
Oh wow, Slacker. I had a friend who loved that movie to the point that it inspired him to move from Houston to Austin in the late 90s! I couldn’t understand why then anymore than I can now, but he’s still there today complaining about how trendy and gentrified his beloved Austin has become.
Ha! Yeah.
It’s not really living in Austin if you’re not complaining about how it used to be.
Or how about how Dazed and Confused hits the seeming exact midpoint between the Boomers and Gen-X (per above discussion) – Boomer subject matter in a Gen-X style narrative. Simply fantastic.
I know at least two folks (maybe 3) that are in Slacker (and maybe in Scanner Darkly). And to a large degree, from about 90-2004 it honestly was pretty great. But even then, old Austin folk would complain about how much it had changed.
Oh wow! Neat. It’s definitely fun looking at how much the different central neighborhoods have changed since then (as someone who showed up much, much later).
But yeah, if there’s one constant here, it’s complaining about change. Haha.
I’ve never seen Reality Bites but I’ve always had Singles as my most Gen X movie. Mainly due to the grunginess.
Abashed the A.Barth stood, and saw how awful Adrian is.
That’s not true, of course. I do respectfully disagree with him about The Crow and agree that Singles and Empire Records are both better than Reality Bites. Some of the Crow characters were a little one-note, but Michael Wincott plays one hell of an antagonist.
If the Slack club would like to watch another music-related movie, may I recommend Rock Star (2001) with Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Aniston. Wahlberg (in a series of not-great wigs) makes a mishmash musical journey from fan to band member to a proto Eddie Vedder. It’s not a great film but it has some good parts and a good cast.
No, it’s a good film.
Did you even make a movie in the nineties if Michael Wincott wasn’t your bad guy? I think not. Great to see him still getting work in Nope.
I’m not familiar with Nope but may need to change that.
What, no followup on Adrian’s citation of “Judgement Night” as an epic flick??
It has perhaps one of the best examples (along with his apparently hated The Crow) of a peak ’90s-style soundtrack – a dream team of well-regarded artists, often doing collaborations. Had it on CD back in the day.
“The Crow’s” soundtrack is so good that it’s 99.9999% of the reason why I got viscerally angry at the thought of a movie remake. I know there are good artists now, and that there’s still some great use of music in film and TV out there (read: I definitely caught that Letterkenny reference in the NX piece, ya buncha degens).
But the potential for disappointment is there, man, and do I trust a film studio in the year of our toiletsplosion 2024 not to pump out a steaming pile of horse manure set to the most bland, radio-friendly “sad” music they can get their hands on? Nope. Not one second.
I still own the soundtrack on CD. It lives in the Mustang, as it has an actual CD player on which to listen to it and other soundtrack gems like Repo Man.
“Who are you man?!” “I’m your…passenger.” <cue Stone Temple Pilots’ Big Empty>
Some of the tracks made it onto the Lemons Rally playlists I put together (at the appropriately named lemonsparty dot org, no less, and do not forget the “s”), and…yeah. That week was the week I heard about a Crow remake, so just like…salt in the wound, man. Let Lee’s final act rest. I do not need to hear the redone MGK version.
Can you have a CD player in a lemons car?
Sure, as long as it’s secured and doesn’t make you crash. Some teams have used sound before to hilarious effect: https://youtu.be/1CFmQOn0gmw
(Ours was for the Lemons Rally, though, which isn’t a race but more of an on-road scavenger hunt-type deal run by the same people.)
Repo Man! Now that’s a great soundtrack. As a late Boomer, naturally I have it on vinyl.
I had a good friend in school who was also a huge fan (we must have watched it hundreds of times, including once in a revival theater), and if someone mentioned Picasso in conversation, one of us was guaranteed to observe “Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.” To which the other would respond “Not like you.”
The funny thing is Picasso was a huge asshole. Now we need to get out of this bad area…
Come on let’s get a drink.
Same reason I got so mad that they remade Roadhouse. No Jeff Healey! You can’t have Roadhouse without Jeff Healey!
Wait! What??! Some idiots remade Roadhouse… why?? No way it is better than the original. My brother tells this story that one of his buddies was hosting a German exchange student who just could not get his head around the whole premise of the movie, so they watched it over and over again. I saw an interview with Kelly lynch not too long ago where she said her family gives her shit about getting naked with Patrick Swazye in that movie and somehow Bill Murray started the ribbing.
On the hmmm…maybe front, they’re also doing a sequel to Repo Man.
BUT Alex Cox is back to direct, and promises an appropriately unhinged movie.
Yeah, Amazon remade it. I refuse to watch that bullshit though.
I watched the Roadhouse remake the other day. I found it entertaining in its own right, but it’s completely different from the original. Don’t throw it out just because of the name.
Little known fact: Jeff Healey himself never saw Roadhouse.
Gadamn it Skeeter…
Last Action Hero, Spawn, Cool World, Tales from the Crypt.
You strike me as someone who also properly appreciated In the Mouth of Madness.
Some movies I haven’t thought about in years…
But which reminded me of Hackers.
Terrible movie, made by old people pretending they knew what young, cool, computer people were like. (Ha, jokes on them, there is no such thing!)
But it did bring us Angelina Jolie, who in that era was… whew.
Yes to all of those.
I’d like to add Friday.
“Fight Club”.
Cmon people…
1999 was a weirdly, singularly good year for movies – so many important, lasting ones came out then. Pre-millennial tension was conducive to some damn good filmmaking I guess.
You’re not supposed to talk about that.
But I don’t think Fight Club was a Gen X movie, was it? It was a little late to the party, and has a different message and tone.
(But a great movie nonetheless.)
“We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”