Define Irony

"It's when the actual meaning is the exact opposite from the literal meaning"

BUUUUUUZZZZZZZZ!!!! WRONG ANSWER!

No, irony is when you make a movie that tries so hard to catch the attention of the counter culture, that it becomes popular making it a novelty of itself.

This is pretty much how i have always felt about the 1994 film Reality Bites.  Recently we got the movie through Netflix, and we decided that after sitting on it for a month, it was time to just get it out of the way.

Now, i've only seen this movie once before, and i didn't enjoy one bit of it then.  So, watching it again after a decade or so not only reaffirmed my distaste for it, but allowed me to find all new reasons to dislike it.

First and foremost, it is one of the most pretentious pieces of crap i've ever seen.  It's like the writer of the dialogue literally couldn't just have the characters deliver lines without being smug and filled with generic angst all the while using an oversized vocabulary.  It's as if someone was trying to capture the 90's counter culture generation and missed the mark completely.  They missed the mark so badly that anyone who claimed to be a part of the counter culture would probably vomit at this persons attempt at capturing them as a group.  Literally, from begining to end, it is just one non-stop verbal diarhea ride as each character attempts to top one another while being smug/snide/"witty"/or all of the above.  Here are just a few examples of how people don't talk:

"Hello, you've reached the winter of our discontent."

"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." 

"You don't understand. Every day, all day, it's all that I think about, OK? Every time I sneeze, it's like I'm four sneezes away from the hospice, and it's like it's not even happening to me. It's like I'm watching it on some crappy show like "Melrose Place" or some shit, right? And I'm the new character, I'm the HIV-AIDS character, and I live in the building and I teach everybody that it's OK to be near me, it's OK to talk to me, and then I die. And there's everybody at my funeral wearing halter tops or chokers or some shit like that."

So now imagine an hour and thirty three minutes of this trite bullshit.  It's almost as if the characters aren't even having the same conversation half the time.  For example, on that last quote there with the whole intellectual leap of having AIDS and Melrose Place, the whole dialogue between Janeane and Winona is borderline laughable.  Janeane is basically telling her supposed BFF, Winona, that she may be dying of AIDS, and the reaction from Winona is fucking ludacris and falls emotionally flat.  If a friend was telling me that they could be dying from AIDS, and i reacted the way Winona does in this scene, i would fully expect this friend to punch me in the insensitive face.

I think the biggest irony of the movie, besides the fact that it literally illustrates everything it stands against in theory, is that they are making a very blatant jab at the 1990's Mtv programming.  Dude, Mtv fucking created the 1990's counter culture!!  This is when Mtv still played music, but was just starting to scratch the service of reality television with the first seasons of The Real World.  Mtv wrote the damn book on 1990's counter culture using The Real World and editing as its vehicle.  So, when Ben Stiller and Reality Bites get on their soap box and start making jabs at "the corporation" trying to profit on thier life events, they are basically making a mockery out of themselves.  Again, there wouldn't have been a 1990's counter culture if it wasn't for Mtv cramming it down all of those impressionable twenty somethings throats.

Needless to say, Reality Bites definetly doesn't stand the test of time, in terms of message.  Every character in it is not only a total cookie cutter generic personality, from the philosophical loser guy that nobody understands and is totally anti-establishment (oh yeah, he's a musician too, big surprise there), to the "evil" corporate yuppy who tries to cash in on the counter culture, to the liberated slut who may have to come to terms with her life choices catching up with her by getting periodic AIDS tests.  It's all just so blatantly contrived that it's literally dissapointing to know that Ben Stiller directed it.  So on top of having to deal with what a piece of shit the movie is, i get to struggle with the fact that Ben Stiller is a joke of a director.

Ugh, i just needed to vent about how bad i think this movie is.  I know that i am in the minority when it comes to this film, and i also know that it's just a movie and shouldn't be taken so seriously.  But i also know that there are people who literally claim this as one of their all time favorite films, and god forbid anybody actually designs their life after it.