I trust I'm not the only person to have had a busy holiday season. I told myself "it's ok to fall behind on your blogs, no one has time to read them anyway"... Now here we are, weeks behind on the 90's movies series (which ended on Boxing Day) with thoughts more focused on Top 10's and 30 Films!
That's right, what's a January without 30 Films in 31 Days? 9 Years Strong (and badly promoted this year by yours truly), we are over a week into a January tradition!
Also on the list of to-do's every January (even though I've shamefully done this in February some years) is to provide one's Top 10 films of the previous year. While I read critic and website lists unabashedly, I try to stay away from friends' lists until I've finalized my own, this year few friends have posted their lists (yet?), but out of those who have, I've peeked at Mr. Nadarajah's list on chichdarling.com. Jerry's a good friend and local film writer for whom I have a great respect. He also declared early on in the year that Ida was one of the best films he'd seen, but I see from your list it was actually more like one of the 20 best films you've seen this year! ;)
I've been jotting down notes for my own top 10, hopefully to be posted before the month of January expires. In the meantime let's touch on those Back to the 90's Films from the latter part of the 2014 program...
Back to the 90's Reality Bites
(some portions written in November 2014)
90's recap or not, I like to talk about Reality Bites a lot, so forgive me if you've heard some of this before.
Though it was made in 1993, I didn't see Reality Bites until a few years later when my uncle introduced it to me. I didn't think much of it the first time, but it really grew on me during subsequent viewings until it became one of my favourite 90's films.
I didn't really get the characters when I was 15... Lelaina, Troy, Vicky, and Sammy. From everything I'd been taught up to that point, they were college graduates, and that meant they should've had everything handed to them on a platter. Yes, this is what was instilled into me as an asian child growing up in the 80's/90's: study hard and get into university, it is your ultimate goal and will solve all of life's problems and guarantee you happiness.
So you see why Reality Bites resonated more and more over time. School didn't give us the answers, school didn't even get me a job, I finished university more lost than ever. Troy's friends implore him to go back and get his BFA in an early scene, I can't help but snicker whenever this part comes up. I've got that piece of paper hanging on my wall, it represents memories of creative freedom, of a time when everyone bent over backwards to do everything different because that's what was expected, but it's never earned me a buck or solved any of my problems.
I miss film school all the time. And sometimes I even miss the slacker attitudes that defined young adults for a time. Sure it gave those I grew up with a bit of a bad rap, but the possibilities somehow seemed greater then, greater than what youth of today have even (unless that's just the age talking...?)
Anyway, to me Reality Bites is the quintessential Gen X film, I'm surprised Amazon doesn't package it up with Douglas Coupland's book and promote it under the "customers who bought Reality Bites also bought this" section.
The only attitude I'm kinda glad has changed is the lessening of the appeal of Troy Dyer-types, that is, young women have been swayed by nerd culture (even if it does mean the glorification of the hipster) and other forces, and have moved away from the brooding artist types as the "dream male". I mooned over my share of such guys growing up, and while some of them are still good friends (and much less brooding!), I have to say that many of them did not treat women well. Not in their self-absorption and moody outbursts. Girls of the 90's: Troy Dyer is a jerk and we should've never put up with that.
Back to the 90's Romeo + Juliet
A visual feast of the 90's, and by that I mean Baz Luhrmann's visuals too. Seriously though, was Leo DiCaprio ever more beautiful than he was in Romeo + Juliet? I was 14 years old and Leonardo DiCaprio was 18 when I first decided I was in love with him, however when I went to see him in this movie, it was actually with my high school boyfriend on our first movie date.
As I say, Luhrmann's stunning visuals are pretty much guaranteed to delight, but as far as stories go, this has never been my idea of Will Shakespeare's finest. Actually, I'm not even a fan of the bard truth be told, and this movie did little to change my opinions. It's one of those films where I like everything about it - Leo, the cinematography, the wicked soundtrack - except the story. I'm also not entirely sure what makes it so "90's" as to qualify this list other than our youthful worship of Leo and Claire.
For whatever reason, I had actually watched Romeo + Juliet just prior to the Back to the 90's series getting started, so I didn't see this film in and around the time it screened. That week I chose another 90's film instead, another (loose) adaptation of Shakespeare's, The Taming of the Shrew this time, that I thought should've been included in this series but wasn't: She's All That.
Ok, I get She's All That perpetuates the ridiculous Hollywood practice of throwing glasses and baggy clothes onto a pretty girl and branding her as an "ugly ducking", but the story underneath that was modernized and made much more relevant to 90's culture than Romeo + Juliet was, whose only real modern reference was the use of media to transmit news of events in Verona (what did Will Shakespeare use again? Voice of God? A minstrel?...kidding...) Laney Boggs may have had bizarre interests in interpretive theatre but you could relate to her character and what she went through as a teenager.
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