Books, Arts & Manners: In Your Face TV, Popcorn Pictures

THIS movie about life and love among recent college grads, Reality Bites, is moderately frightening. If this is what today’s young are like, that is not good; if not—because the young people who wrote, directed, and acted in the movie cannot even tell their own story—that is worse yet. This is the account of the first post-graduate year of four happy beer-guzzlers in Houston, as written by 23-year-old Helen Childress, who has a small part in it, and directed by Ben Stiller, a young comedian (and son of the comedians Stiller and Meara), who has a big part in it. Its principal couple is played by Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke, two of our classier young actors. The film is both false and true: its stated truths are superficial and simplistic, but its unintentional revelations are depressingly plausible.

Lelaina Pierce, the valedictorian of her class, has been making a documentary about herself and her friends: Troy Dyer, the sensitive hunk, a musician who quotes poetry, but could as easily be a jock; Vickie Miner, the tough little broad, who keeps track in her notebook of the guys she sleeps with, but can’t remember the name of Number 66 whom she wakes up next to; and Sammy Gray, a likable nerd who is possibly Jewish and definitely homosexual, but doesn’t get any of the good lines—which already doesn’t ring true.

JS

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John Simon

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THIS movie about life and love among recent college grads, Reality Bites, is moderately frightening. If this is what today’s young are like, that is not good; if not—because the young people who wrote, directed, and acted in the movie cannot even tell their own story—that is worse yet. This is the account of the first post-graduate year of four happy beer-guzzlers in Houston, as written by 23-year-old Helen Childress, who has a small part in it, and directed by Ben Stiller, a young comedian (and son of the comedians Stiller and Meara), who has a big part in it. Its principal couple is played by Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke, two of our classier young actors. The film is both false and true: its stated truths are superficial and simplistic, but its unintentional revelations are depressingly plausible.

Lelaina Pierce, the valedictorian of her class, has been making a documentary about herself and her friends: Troy Dyer, the sensitive hunk, a musician who quotes poetry, but could as easily be a jock; Vickie Miner, the tough little broad, who keeps track in her notebook of the guys she sleeps with, but can’t remember the name of Number 66 whom she wakes up next to; and Sammy Gray, a likable nerd who is possibly Jewish and definitely homosexual, but doesn’t get any of the good lines—which already doesn’t ring true.