Word: stiller
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directed by Ben Stiller...
starring Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, and Ben Stiller...
...crucial point in the new film "Reality Bites," Michael (Ben Stiller), an executive for the new cable network In Your Face TV--"it's like MTV, but with an edge"--is about to reveal to his fellow executives a video documentary made by aspiring young filmmaker Leleina (Winona Ryder). Leleina's documentary is about herself and her three friends Troy, Vicki, and Sammy, who all have just graduated from college and are now trying to make it in the real world. Leleina intends her video to be a serious consideration of the many issues which confront the twenty-somethings...
Ryder, in turn, is lucky with both script and direction. The former is by Helen Childress, 23, who not only has a good ear for the sound of her contemporaries but also knows how to shape it into dialogue that is pointed and full of unforced observations. Director Ben Stiller keeps things crisp, no small matter in a movie that features a fair amount of aimless activity and just plain lying around. The latter takes place in the "maxipad" Lelaina shares with Vickie (Janeane Garofalo), who sometimes imagines her own funeral as a scene from Melrose Place ("chokers and halter...
Troy is just the kind of broody lout a young woman like Lelaina goes for, despite the fact that junior TV-exec Michael (played by Stiller) is wooing her. Their triangle provides what passes for narrative structure, and its resolution is perhaps just a little too Brady Bunch -- that is, too nice and neat. But that's a small price to pay for a movie in which Vickie, confronting a small, unexpected example of decency, finds it "screws up all my old ideas of good and evil." And in which a despondent Lelaina, seeking solace from an 800-number therapist...