THE QUEST FOR THE MOST ’90s FILM OF ALL TIME
Singles

Among film geek types, it has become fashionable to bash two lines of dialogue from recent cinema:

1. “You gotta hear this one [Shins] song. It’ll change your life, I swear.” - Garden State
2. “I love the smiths. You have good taste in music.” - (500) Days of Summer

The implication is that those shallow pop culture quirks are being used to develop the characters in lieu of something more authentic and less lazy, that if you strip away whatever indie reference is coloring that character, there would be no color at all. These people should take another look at how colorful the poster for Generation X (TM) comedy Singles is.

I like Singles and (500) Days of Summer—and Garden State to a lesser extent—but I won’t pretend that they could hold up without those reference points. Cameron Crowe, who made my favorite movie of the ’00s,* would be a completely average filmmaker without those touchstones, and I don’t see that as a hindrance. In most cases—except for the obligatory lingering shot of album covers that give him an erection [+1]—they make the film better. Those details make the movie more personal and more real, so why shouldn’t he use them? I don’t hear anyone making fun of the Simon & Garfunkel songs in The Graduate. Anyway, whether you love or hate Singles, it is built upon ’90s ephemera, which is what we’re all here for.

STARS/PERFORMANCES
- Actors Who Are Unquestionably Tied to the Decade- Bridget Fonda- [+10]
Campbell Scott is the surrogate Cameron Crowe character—there always is one—but Bridget Fonda is the conflicted coffee girl cog in this rom-com ensemble. She headlined a few movies in the ’90s, then she turned thirty and fell off the face of the earth. We’ll always have the bathtub scene in The Road to Wellville though.

- Other Notable Actors/Characters- Lots! It’s a Generation X Ensemble. A-Duh. [+10]
So Fonda is in love with Matt Dillon, who fronts a grunge band called Citizen Dick [+5]. (The members of Pearl Jam have celebrity cameos as the other dudes in the band [+3]. There’s even a line in which someone refers to Eddie Vedder as the drummer, which is hilarious because he’s actually a singer in real life, not a drummer in this made-up thing where he’s acting as something else.) She’s starting to wonder if Matt Dillon loves her for who she is, so she looks into getting breast implants from super-sensitive Bill Pullman with the $20,000 she has stored away from coffee girl tips. We know she doesn’t have any money because she’s “saving up for architecture school” [+1].


I think they’re just called “those hats Jeff Ament wears.”

Fonda and Dillon live in an apartment complex with Campbell Scott, who is going to solve Seattle’s traffic problem with a Supertrain [+1]. (Oh word, fam? You didn’t know Supertrains are the new rollerblades?) We know he’s cool and not sell-out because he wears Mudhoney shirts [+1]. He falls in love with Kyra Sedgwick, who is an environmental activist doing indeterminate work that might force her to go on a “research trip,” which would threaten the budding romance [+1]. Kyra Sedgwick always looks as if she just sneezed.

After all, relationships are, like, so hard, you know? Jim True, who would go on to play Prez in The Wire, knows what I’m talking about. He tries to fill his calculator watch up with girls’ numbers [+2] when he and Campbell Scott go to an Alice in Chains concert [+2] to pretend that Alice in Chains play good music. Then there’s this other character whose only function in the film is showing that video dating services [+3] are weird, which, I’ll grant you, they were.


Funny hat number two: Jim True wears this kufi thing for the entire movie.

(I realize this movie is special to some people, so I don’t mean to completely ridicule it. The first two-thirds of it are solid. It does everything fairly well, and—just as importantly—it did everything first. It’s just not that movie for me.)

TECHNOLOGY/CULTURAL RELICS
- Could the Plot Reasonably Occur with Current Technology?
No [+10]. The dating conventions of Singles would be completely unrecognizable to a modern twentysomething. There’s the mandatory scene in which the Campbell Scott and Jim True characters debate over when is the “cool” time to call back Kyra Sedgwick [+5].* Today they already would have lol’d several times over EPA links that they tweeted back and forth. They also wouldn’t say things like, “Casual sex doesn’t exist anymore—it’s lethal” [+1]. And arguments about Xavier McDaniel  would be relegated to E-Mail [+1].

The potential research trip is an obstacle because it will keep the couple apart for a month, but I don’t think that would be as big of a deal what with your Skypeing and your LiveJournals and your Xangas and your Black Planets and your Pings and your Orkuts. People I would consider good friends haven’t physically seen me in two or three years.

- Hacking/Computers
We missed a cybersex scene by about two years. But can I interest you in a Supertrain?

- Other Technological Notes
This is pretty engaging for a movie that has several scenes revolving around people in phone booths or waiting for phones—rotary phones—to ring [+5]. Of course, there are just as many scenes in which a person gets home and just misses an important message on her answering machine [+5]. It’s a shame that no one uses answering machines anymore because they were a great filmic device.

What else? Oh, a big plot point revolves around huge garage door openers [+2]. Characters set off burglar alarms [+2], and fax machines are more integral to designing Supertrains than color monitors are [+2]. On the flip side, newsstands still exist, and people receive postcards from their friends as well [+2].

- References
Films are a mess when they’re actually trying to sum up the zeitgeist. It’s more effective when that just sort of happens. When Singles is at its worst, you can tell that Crowe just wrote a bunch of “Young Adults in the ’90s Stuff” on note cards and felt the need to carry it all out.* “Yeah, and breast implants! What’s up with that?” This sort of voice-of-a-generation navel-gazing also gives us lines like, “The next World War is going to be sponsored” [+1]. Put your erection down, Cam. But congratulations on nailing that line seven years before Fight Club did it. There you go: You’re more than just the Mission to Mars to Reality Bites’ Red Planet.

Also, bike messengers [+3]. I hope they don’t lose their jobs because of the impending Supertrain.


“So…Seattle?”
“Yeah, Seattle!”

FASHION
Holler at leopard print, tucked-in t-shirts, vests, ponytails, flannel, female blazers, tie-dye, big hair, bare midriff, big hats on girls, backwards snap-back caps, and all denim everything [+12]. There’s actually a scene in which a guy is wearing a denim shirt and jeans while talking to a woman who is wearing a jean jacket and jeans [+3]. It’s like a Magic Eye picture.

The more clothes the normal people in the film wear though, the fewer clothes the bands in the club scenes wear. Really, Chris Cornell?

’90s FILM CONVENTIONS
Characters Talking Directly to the Camera As If This Were a Documentary [+5].
After the first five minutes, this device is completely abandoned for an hour and brought back awkwardly at the end. It’s quite obviously influenced by Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives,although Crowe would probably tell you some shit about how he “wanted it to look the same way that side two of Goat’s Head Soup feels.”

Title Cards to Introduce “Chapters” of the Film [+5]
And they’re hand-written! DIY, y’all! Screaming Trees would be proud.

Buying Way Too Many Pregnancy Tests [+5]
I’ve never understood why movie characters have to buy fifty different tests and dump them wily-nily in their basket as if they’re Cadbury eggs or something. Those tests are expensive, bro. It makes for one of the funniest scenes in this movie though.

Exaggerated Break-Up Hangover [+5]
It’s not enough to break up with your girlfriend and go back to work. You have to grow a beard and never change from your bathrobe and lie on the floor listening to jazz, surrounded by pizza boxes. Rather than pondering the meaning of life and coming up with silly projects around the house, couldn’t you just be a bit grumpy at work like the rest of us? I mean, you design Supertrains and live somewhere that rains 150 days out of the year. You’re probably so depressed in your daily life that people wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.

OTHER
One thing I found interesting was the way the specter of Nirvana hangs over this movie. Nevermind was released a whole year before Singles was, so you know they were on Cameron Crowe’s radar. (Plus, he totally had the “Love Buzz” 7” before you had even heard of them.) Following Seattle twentysomethings around for ninety minutes and never even hearing the name Kurt Cobain is unlikely. In 1992 it was unlikely to follow anyone for ninety minutes without hearing the name Kurt Cobain. Crowe has said that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was originally in the film, but it became too expensive to clear by the time the movie was released. After the movie came out, Cobain said that he he hated it. I think there’s more beef than meets the eye. Maybe Killa Cam was forced to choose between Pearl Jam and Nirvana? All I know is that it’s outright distracting that no one even mentions the one thing about Seattle most people would have known about at the time.

Without even really trying, Singles racked up 114 points, making it the Most ’90s Film of All Time…for now.

*- How awesome would it have been if you had clicked on that link to reveal that Elizabethtown is my favorite movie of the ’00s?
*- The correct answer is “never.” Kevin Bacon’s squeeze is one degree away from “not attractive.”
*- According to Coppola, this is exactly what he did for Apocalypse Now, but you can only tell in the Redux version.