Reality Bites

Oh, the ennui of Generation X. A pretentious movie full of insufferable characters making terrible decisions. '90s college-age navel-gazing at its most aggravating. I'm not convinced Ethan Hawke was even acting here. It does have a cool soundtrack, so points for that.

One of the worst films I've ever seen. Just terrible. All of the reasons I hate people are in this movie. If it were a satire, that'd be acceptable. But it's not, so it's just sad.

This film suffers from a conflict: on the one hand, it evinces a desire to express some kind of significance; on the other hand, it is even more clearly aimed at a "target audience". The degree to which this movie is conceived as a product for a particular niche of consumers ends up undermining the meaningfulness it strives too hard to attain. In the end, the experience turns out to be utterly unpleasant.

So self-consciously hip and pretentious that it made my butt-hole hurt. Fuck this god-damned movie.

Please kill me so I don't have to listen to these insufferable twerps wax sardonic about their lives in front of a camera held by a blind person having an epileptic fit.

I remember when I used to think this would be the worst generation ever. Oh nostalgia!

Kind of insulting as an attempt to relate to a supposed "Generation X".

I should maybe score this higher, if only because it represents a moment in time so well. Unfortunately, the film around it is grating. I love Ethan Hawke. I am hawt for Hawke. This film made me hate Hawke.

Movie was alright, but the ending fucking sucks. What can you expect, I guess? Ben Stiller more or less did everything right, and Wynona Ryder still goes for Ethan Hawke? God, I was hoping Hawke was going to overdose or commit suicide or something. Fuck that. Steve Zahn is always awesome, though, so points there. God, I thought my generation was bad, but the decade ahead of me was full of shit heads.

Cloyingly earnest...maaaaaan.

Smart, funny and sincere, but not quite the movie it purports to be - meaning that it captures the sentiment of that generation. It almost does, but not quite.

God I hate this flick. I Just say no to this film, while simultaneously saying yes to drugs... Toe knee :-)

Pretentious: The Movie. Steve Zahn and Janeane Garofalo give pretty great performances, and there are a lot of little parts from a lot of actors that you'll probably recognize (Keith David, David Spade, etc.). Winona Ryder's character is almost completely unlikeable, but she's fine compared to Ethan Hawke's character. He's like every shitty intellectual musician/artist cliche you've ever seen in film. You can't root for him at all, even with Stiller's character being a moron.

Reality bites...almost as much as this trite movie that catered to the genxers.

good movie

I never thought I could be so happy to see Ben Stiller show up--he's about the only character in this that acts like something resembling an actual adult. He also plays the only character I can recognize as more or less real, as opposed to the caricatures everyone else gets to flail away at....perhaps it's one of the perks of being the director, too. Still, moderately enjoyable if you don't take it seriously... at all.

Stiller does a good work directing his friends, but so does Lubezki. The great DP frames the characters so gently -- and in such informative locations, as the couch (yep), the coffee place, the empty urban places of Houston -- that empathy comes with just a look, like watching TV -- actually, this is such an important visual element here. Winona brings one of her best performances as this journalist struggling with career and love and shooting a VCR doc about her friends.

9 points for Ethan Hawke. This movie is really bad. I'd stick it in Ryder but she'd probably steal my wallet in the morning.

Young love in and for the Nineties -- which apparently entails a preoccupation with the Seventies: TV reruns, goldie oldies, wall posters (_Saturday Night Fever_, _Love Story_), memorabilia ("Charlie's Angels" lunchbox). The script, about a one-for-all-and-all-for-one foursome of college grads, is riddled with observations on the level of "Evian is naive spelled backward." And the indulgence of these people seems somehow an accurate match for, or projection of, their self-indulgence.

You just wanna punch the pretentious Hawke.

winona ryder. winona ryder. winona ryder. winona ryder. winona ryder.

As a member of the so-called "Generation X", I have to say this is the single most embarrassing thing to come out of that whole non-phenomenon. And that includes "OK Cola". However, at least it is slightly less awful than the "Generation Y" abomination Empire Records.

Early Ben Stiller, ey? This young man seems to have prom... aah, forget it, we're all watching Winona.

every generation has thier garden state

It has a lot of those pretentious asshole fags that usually make a movie suck but this is watchable, mostly cause of Ryder and Hawke.