Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
There’s a pivotal scene where Winona Ryder’s flatly implausible, would be documentarian throws a fit because her footage has been perverted and subverted by commercial interests, but its ostensible inauthenticity is barely distinguishable from the unbearably phony documentary-style footage that opens the movie. Every attempt this movie makes to detail its characters and premise with “reality” is just screaming with pretension, obviousness and archness. This movie plays the way a Sunday newspaper article about “Gen X” would have read in 1994: just clueless and, especially in Ethan Hawke’s character, rife with contempt for nuance. I hated this movie when I saw it in its initial run and I hate it now on my first ever rewatch, but I have to admit that its unabashed nineties-ness, though noxiously phony, isn’t totally inaccurate. There really was a way of living that was all bad nightclubs, performative smoking, ostentatious slacking and having endless, inane conversations with friends. I just wish director Ben Stiller’s portrayal of these features of that decade were a lot less ham fisted.
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