singles [1992]

anna reminded me a couple days ago that this flick is now 30 years old.  this movie is a lodestar for Gen X cinema.  that doesn't mean it is a great, or even good, film.  but writer/director cameron crowe captured the zeitgeist of twentysomethings in Seattle right at the moment of the founding of the name for my generation & the rise of grunge music.

this pic was broadcast tonight on a cable music channel.  no, not MTV.  a different one that doesn't play music videos but will broadcast live performances & programs dedicated to music & band trivia.  as well as movies that are at least tangential to popular music.

crowe is a gifted filmmaker.  & Seattle is his city.  i consider the great john cusack/ione skye vehicle Say Anything [1989] to be crowe's magnum opus of which captured late 1980s pre-grunge Seatle culture.  but it was this flick under review that really captured the era of its making.  Seattle was the hot city to be in & for bands to emerge out of.  members of pearl jam, sound garden, alice in chains, et al.  make their appearances in this movie.  hell, there are so many cameos, from tim burton to paul giamatti, that anna & i had to pause the movie & to go to our phones to check to see who we thought we had just seen was indeed that same person.

& so the premise of the pic is a small apartment building populated by quirky Gen Xers who are doing their fucking best to navigate young adulthood & romantic/sexual relationships.  often the actors, matt dillon, campbell scott, kyra sedgwick, bridget fonda et al. breaks the fourth wall to speak to the audience on the goings on.  does this shit work?  kinda.  but fucking hell, i'm biased in favor of this flick.  it's got a killer soundtrack.  it is so much of its time.  & it is one of the few movies made about my generation that was called TWENTY-NOTHINGS or THE SLACKER GENERATION until novelist douglas coupland published his groundbreaking novel that put a name to it, GENERATION X.

not that i'm complaining of neglect for my generation.  who fucking cares.  & yet, i do, in a small way.  for the sounds & fashions of this movie are very much part of the DNA of my own twenties.  i enjoyed the fuck out of watching this movie again & i'm shocked that those 30 years blinked right on by.  fucking hell.  when i was a wee lad the elders would tell me to slow the hell down & savor my youth for the years would soon gallop swiftly by.  i was a cocky i-know-everything young man who ignored these elders as if they didn't know shit.  time flying past at light speeed?  p-shaw!  when you are 20 a summer can feel like a lifetime.  

but at my advanced age a year goes past so quickly i am often confused.  those elders were right!  & but so, cameron crowe has crafted a movie that redounds its time.  & i had a blast reliving it.