The spin on generation X

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2000)

There are some funny moments in this film and uniformly good acting and direction. What's missing? Well, a plausible story to begin with.
Record store proprietor John Cusack's live-in girlfriend moves out, triggering a personal journey of discovery in which he tries to find out why he hasn't wound up with any of the significant loves of his life. He revisits as many old girlfriends as he can and talks about it, mostly to the audience in monologues fired like a machine gun directly at the camera.
But here's the rub. Cusack plays a whinny, needy, totally dependent loser. At one point he says to the camera: "You're probably wondering how a guy like me gets all these girls."
We are, and the answer is, he wouldn't. Most intelligent, self confident and attractive women wouldn't have given him the time of day. But this movie follows the current trend of playing to "me" generation fantasies, and one of the most popular is to take loser guys and show them getting somebody like Catherine Zeta Jones into bed. The truth is, it's rich, powerful, successful guys like Michael Douglas who get Catherine Zeta Jones into bed. Guys who work in record stores get to help these girls sort through the resale bins, but it stops there.
Cusack's store and staff are colorful, filled with generation X types who have an encyclopedic known of record trivia, but probably couldn't have located Kosovo on a map if their lives had depended upon it. (I always knew ending the draft was a mistake.)
The whole movie, as a matter of fact, is an ode to a generation that bases the measure of a person's intelligence on how well they can formulate top five lists. Cusack's character admits he has been a professional appreciater all his life. He himself can find nothing more creative to do than refine the art of making compilation tapes.
Cusack is a good actor, but he's becoming the sort of poster boy for the slacker generation. "Being John Malkovich" was about a similar guy whose idea of creativity was looking at the world through someone else's eyes, but doing it well, of course.
In truth, the entire premise of this film -- the "personal journey of discovery" concept --is one more piece of evidence that Hollywood continues to lower the bar when it comes to film writing. No matter what kind of resolution the story has,the problems here are largely inconsequential and so is the story. I got tired of watching a totally self indulgent guy doing absolutely nothing but feed his own fantasies. It was like a two hour Seinfeld episode and I could never even sit through a half hour one.
There has to be something better to make films about than this!