Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

Singles

12/14/2016

C-
1.52

Early 90's grunge enthusiasts look for love.

Directed by Cameron Crowe
Starring Bridget Fonda, Matt Dillon, and Campbell Scott
Initial Review by Drew Landry

There are few times in history where I wish I could be at certain points in my life. And to be in my mid – twenties during the beginning moments of the grunge rock revolution and the craze over coffee in 1992 Seattle, Washington, is one of those times. Automatically, Singles got off to a great start with footage of its scenery and soundtrack. The music in this film was sublime but more on that later.

The story of Singles was nothing new as it has been played numerous times from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to The Wedding Singer to nearly any Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock film. What sets Singles apart from them was twofold. One was its time and relevance. These characters talked about sex and dating in an honest and open manner. The tide was turning in our culture around this point on sex’s open discussion and Singles aided in that effort. Nowadays, viewers see this discussion and do not flinch. We view it as a commonplace but it was not that way in the early nineties.

The second piece of the puzzle was its music and how it strongly influenced the characters.  This role usually befalls to a city like New York, Chicago, L.A., but music?  Steve and Linda met at an Alice in Chains concert, Janet was in love with Cliff who was the lead singer of a band, Steve was a DJ in college and had a lot of vinyl to play for Linda, Janet was turned on when she listened to a Mudhoney song, and the list continues.  It would be difficult for anyone to name another movie where a film’s music was its fixture and not its location.

The way it was portrayed could possibly give viewers heartburn.  It was not done in any kind of symmetrical order because there was neither a problem that needed to be fixed at the beginning nor a solution to things at the end.  It was five people’s search for happiness and for those characters, “happiness” was success in the workplace and finding love.

Singles had some comical parts too.  The video dating scene was hilarious.  Anyone not notice Tim Burton’s cameo in that scene?  Also, the pregnancy test was difficult not to smile at.  “Is it blue?”  *Camera fades to show a blue watery substance in a test tube.* Side note, what a difficult pregnancy test!  Of course, Cliff talking about the song “Touch Me, I’m Dick” was the quintessential stereotype of a dumb front man but still funny.  Then, when Janet kisses him at the end was both ridiculous and funny.

Lastly, it was filled with cameos from movie and music people. Tim Burton as aforementioned, Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, Lane Stanley, Jerry Cantrell, Cameron Crowe all made appearances. Seeing them peppered throughout was nicely done.

This was a solid film.  The breaks or what can be called “chapters” were bothersome but that was something Cameron Crowe meant to do.  He purposely told an asymmetrical, emotional story and did it well but that does not mean it would be well received.  Despite that, Singles was a good film.

Grade: B

28 Comments

Admin

12/14/2016 11:57:12 am

Admin purposes

Cooker

12/14/2016 12:02:34 pm

I didn’t take notes like I normally do, having watched this while sick with the stomach flu. Likewise, I enjoyed Singles, but if you ask me about it in a year, I’ll probably only be able to tell you it was about single people that lived in the same building; I might remember the whole Seattle and grunge music thing.

Right from the get-go, I knew there’d be a great ‘90s soundtrack. There were some fun cameos by Alice in Chains (R.I.P., Layne and Mike) and Soundgarden, amongst others.

I liked the concept of the photograph and the pondering of why love can’t be this easy. Most of us have been there. I was single for four-and-a-half years in between relationships once and was probably trying to be in one that entire time. The movie had good characters and good acting, but a story that’s been done (some characters’ involvement more interesting than others); like I said, ask me in a year specifics about this movie and I won’t remember. This movie reminded me of St. Elmo’s Fire (although, I haven’t seen that in years). I even read on Wikipedia that director Cameron Crowe claims that this movie inspired the TV show, Friends, something else it reminded me of. Regardless, I’m still giving this a B. It made for good entertainment on a sick day.

Sean

12/14/2016 12:02:40 pm

High Fidelity would be a music over location movie.

Bryan

12/14/2016 12:04:10 pm

Ever watch a movie where you know the actors are acting and nothing matters? That's Singles.

Who the hell mixed this movie? The audio is normal, then there's a concert ... and now my kids are awake. Thanks Singles.

One of the actresses ends up accidentally pregnant, no one seems sad, then there's a car crash, and still no one is sad. WTF is going on?

I finished watching Singles while prepping a pot pie. I wanted to slice my throat and end everything.

I'll go D- because the video dating was historically signficant, mainly because I just listened to a podcast about the invention of computer match dating services in the 1960s which went on to talk about video dating.

Drew

12/14/2016 12:22:28 pm

"One of the actresses ends up accidentally pregnant, no one seems sad, then there's a car crash, and still no one is sad. WTF is going on?"

Did you think - maybe - they loved each other to where a pregnancy was not a sad situation?

Also, did you not see where she cried in the hospital bed and he tried to comfort her in there? Did you also not think the baby's miscarriage motivated her to go on that business trip?

Sadness existed.

sean

12/14/2016 01:13:05 pm

Of course sadness existed it's Seattle

Lane

12/15/2016 07:17:16 pm

For all the notable musical cameo’s in “Singles,” it’s striking to note who wasn’t featured: Nirvana. I mean, “Bleach” was released in ’89 and the band was recording “Nevermind” during the filming, so they were around. I’m sure there are legal or logistical or just artistic reasons that Nirvana didn’t want their music in the film. Or maybe Crowe (who was besties with Pearl Jam who had an ongoing flannel-lined media spat with Cobain and Nirvana during the early ‘90’s) wanted to give screen time to his preferred bands instead of Nirvana. But for whatever reason, Nirvana’s absence says a lot about the kind of film we’re watching.

Nirvana was not a band your parents approved of you listening to (I can attest). Nirvana was dark. Drugs and violence and mental illness were a part of their mystique. Besides songs about teen disaffection, “Nevermind” had songs like “Lithium” (named after the anti-psychotic drug) and their follow up album “In Utero” famously featured the song “Rape Me” amongst other hits. When you listen to the amp feedback on a song like “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter,” you know you’re not listening to something written for radio or pop consumption.

And so, for all the edginess that “Singles” wants to pretend it has, in its espresso stained heart, the film is just standard sanitized rom-com stock. It has much more in common with “Sleepless in Seattle” than with the Seattle Sound. There is no darkness here at all. Even the atmosphere of the film was bright and sunny most of the time. I’ve spent a little time the Pacific North West and I promise they have clouds. Why would Crowe make a film where everyone seems so sober and pleasantly dissatisfied when Pearl Jam played a promo concert for the film where Eddie Vedder slid across the stage in a drunken, blitzed out craze? The early ‘90’s was not always such a happy time in the culture and grunge music was a cultural expression of this psychological angst, and yet none of this dissonance seems to find expression here.

While I liked Bridget Fonda’s performance and this might have been the first time I’ve ever liked Matt Dillon, I found the relationships to be kind of boring. It’s like Crowe was screen-testing a few episodes of “Friends.” If Linda and Steve’s relationship had a proper soundtrack it would have been Rod Stewart’s “Rhythm of My Heart” and Amy Grant’s “Baby, Baby” (or they could have gotten spicy and listened to New Jack City’s “I Wanna Sex You Up.”). Janet and Cliff’s relationship felt more veritable for an early 20’s vagabond existence, but if this was Seattle in the early ‘90’s surely Cliff would have a heroin problem and Janet would have had an HIV scare. Un-wed pregnancy and boob jobs are so 1960’s, and that’s really the decade this movie portrays, not the ‘90’s. This is less a movie about authentic relationships and more about the speed bumps towards upward mobility.

If this is the most authentic movie about Seattle ever made (which I’ve seen a website or two suggest) it makes me think that Seattle, as a city, was actually much less interesting than the music it produced. Or maybe it's just that no one made a good movie about the era (and thus, probably never will). I can see why Crowe calls this the movie he’s least satisfied with. Crowe is still a good, if predictable, filmmaker and he tells a good story, but if the idea was to capture an era, then I’m afraid he captured the wrong one.

Grade: C

12/16/2016 03:09:59 pm

Do you give grades lower than C?

12/16/2016 04:29:53 pm

Sometimes. What was that movie we watched about the family in Epcot? That was solid low D to F territory. I tend to think that most things that come out of the studio system fall into a curve, which means most films will be in C- to A- territory.

12/16/2016 06:29:48 pm

Not a fan. None of these people feel real at all. Matt Dillon is the
Most poser bs grunge rocker of all time. It was bad enough to think maybe he was written as preposterous but nobody treated him that way other than the music critic.
The guy who works on trains has to be one of the whitest people in America. All these people were going to grunge concerts dressed like they were shopping at the Gap. That was so distracting my out of place. Should've been a one act play, they had the set for it with the exterior of the apartment building. As a 1 act play I wouldn't have had to watch it. D

Jon

12/17/2016 01:38:17 am

First, let's agree that it's insane that the writer/director of Almost Famous also made this. I'll allow that Cameron Crowe, who did follow a band around as a teenage reporter, was closer to that experience than the Seattle grunge scene, but there are exponential levels of emotional truth separating these two movies. Crowe is able to compose Lester Bangs' 'you're not cool' monologue, but eight years earlier he has a character in Singles unironically say, "Desperation is the stinkiest cologne," and has other characters starts sentences with "The thing about love is..." This is a barrel of cliches and unrecognizable dialogue with no likable characters or relationships to root for. It doesn't even feel geographically unique, which seems to be objective 1A. Singles is far closer to the Cameron Crowe of Aloha and We Bought A Zoo than the one of Almost Famous, and to a lesser extent, Jerry McGuire.

To defend my boredom with the location, I'll make several concessions. It's possible that the grunge look has been so appropriated that when seeing the genesis of it on film, I'm unable to give the originators the benefit of the doubt and treat their inclusion in Singles as easy shorthand, a flannel-clad type that tells the viewer who background actors are without having to give them lines, instead of treating it as a measure of accuracy. It's possible that Singles may have been the first movie to spread grunge culture around the country, especially considering how shockingly young Pearl Jam looked. However, it's always difficult to put yourself in a pre-knowledgable place, and the grunge type just annoys me, originator or not. Where some might see the founders of a new musical genre, I just see young adult poseurs who will eventually move onto a new look when they're done with this one. I'm not invested at all in grunge's cultural impact and I don't think it's on Singles' top 4 or 5 priorities anyway, so as a historical snapshot of a place in time, Seattle is just another bullshit 'character in the movie,' barely differentiated from any other city if one discounts some unique wardrobe choices.

That's just the location; the characters themselves are working a lot harder to dispel any interest. I like the actors playing the central foursome well enough, as they all have good to great performances in their future, but they have little to no chemistry with each other. Again, Crowe is going to figure out, for a brief period in his future, how to make appealing and authentic couples, but he's far away from that in Singles. I have no interest in anyone here, no investment in a character's eventual satisfaction. I am invested in seeing Matt Dillon's dunderheaded musician fail, and I'll give Crowe credit for so capably creating a character incapable of seriousness, but this is not the kind of movie where people succeed by failing, where their expectations are revealed to be faulty and they get better by shedding them. Dillon's the outlier. This is as simple as 'finding love,' and it's intensely hard to want that for characters as bland as these.

Crowe isn't engaging as a writer, and I think he makes deadly choices as a director, specifically with the many addressing-the-camera moments. I hated them. I don't think they're cute, I don't think they're clever, I just think they're lazy. It's not a complex case of unreliable narrator, either. It's as simple as Crowe wanting more detail about the characters' thought processes and not having a better way to communicate that besides having the character speak to the viewer. I very much wanted there to be some device within the film that excused this, like a friend recording them or an unseen roommate or something equally dumb, but there never was, just a puddle of Crowe's laziness. Also, the intense focus on garage door openers instantly date this movie in a clunky time, far more so than anything music related. It's rarely seems to work out when making present technology a key feature, especially because someone 25 years in the future might pick it to watch and discuss for their movie club.

Singles was mostly interminable, with lots of looks towards how much was left before the credits. While I barely understood what was going on with the model, the video dating montage was the only laugh generated, and as mentioned earlier, I did like how Crowe dismantled Dillon's character's confidence. The stuff in between these distant islands of relief drags Singles into the D's, the land of dislike and frustration. It's been years since Crowe made a well-received movie, possibly dating back to Vanilla Sky. Apparently, Almost Famous is a fluke instead of the rule. That masterpiece is an A; this is a D+.

12/17/2016 02:01:57 am

Almost Famous is made up garbage.

12/17/2016 11:14:32 am

You're made up garbage.

12/17/2016 12:09:51 pm

Be still my heart. :-)

Go ask your hippie parents about its realism.

12/17/2016 12:29:32 pm

It's a good movie though

12/17/2016 12:56:57 pm

You're a good movie though.

12/17/2016 03:14:44 pm

This film was not nearly as bad as some of my fellow members made it out to be. It really boiled down to either or a combination of two things. The humor and/or music.

If one does not like grunge music, then he/she probably will not like the piece. Considering how it was the film's fixture and consistently heard throughout, it can become annoying to anyone who does not like the genre.

Second, and most odd, was how the film's harshest critics in MMC had no sense of humor. Not finding humor in this film was on par with not finding ammo in a gun shop; one was not looking for it.

12/17/2016 04:12:13 pm

I don't have any feelings about grunge, but I would defer to Lane's excellent breakdown of why the soundtrack adds nothing. Grunge is more than just a greatest hits breakdown, it's also a disaffected lifestyle and mode of thinking that the characters in no way embodied.

Humor is not a scientific pursuit, where one person's successful joke is easily pasted onto to another person. If Drew found the movie funny, that's fine. The jokes didn't work for me, and that should be fine, too. It's in our constitution that comedies are going to be hard to argue about, as humor is even more subjective than a person's preference for movies.

12/18/2016 01:08:54 pm

And there was music playing but it wasn't relating to the story, it just happened to be time and place specific. Like all genres there is good and bad grunge. Didn't add or detract from the movies. The characters did that all themselves

12/18/2016 01:14:12 pm

Sean, I mentioned how it was integral to the film in my review. Perhaps you should revisit that portion.

12/18/2016 06:35:01 pm

And drew continues to assume people who disagree with him are stupid. The characters could've been in Nashville going to country music shows and the story wouldn't have needed changing at all. The story is simply about a group of people living in the same building, it just happens to be 90s Seattle.

Drew L

12/18/2016 08:12:42 pm

My alter ego must have written that because I would never say or think that. Good try though.

12/18/2016 01:06:19 pm

I didn't even notice attempts at humor maybe I shouldn't watch it again to find them

12/18/2016 12:40:59 pm

I'm going to submit a second review.

This is a 90's Frances Ha. Both terrible movies where the longer I think about them, the more I despise them.

Bobby

12/18/2016 01:36:54 pm

I'll start with the positives...

Okay, that's all for the positives. I can't find a redeeming quality in this movie. For one, this movie doesn't hold up well over time... clearly. The characters are poorly written, especially the women. It gets the same grade on the Bechdel (spoiler alert) as I'm about to give it... as expected, for the time, I suppose.

Even if we ignore how dated this movie is and how it was pretty standard for the time... The characters were not at all interesting, I didn't care about any of them. The humor didn't work at all for me... the best part being the airport to the kid on the plane. And just when I thought the movie might actually end, with everybody single and away from the people they seemed to be better off without... nope, cue cliche ending where they all get back together. I suppose this movie was about... people, but it really felt like it was about nothing, all the way down to Cliff's useless monologue.

At least the acting and music was adequate... but they couldn't make up for a lost cause. I can't even think of one quality scene... and I asked my friend who watched it as well... and she couldn't either. Actually, the thing i remember most is how far off the vibrating shelves and tv were from Steve and Linda's actual rhythm... or lack thereof.

I honestly rather watch Frances Ha again.

F

Blair

1/2/2017 05:10:42 pm

I like this review! I may need to lower my score

1/2/2017 05:09:42 pm

This movie was awful.

I felt no connection, empathy towards, desire to know about or even know what will happen to ANY of the characters. The two main characters (I can't remember their names) had zero chemistry as actors. What were their jobs? No idea and I don't care. How did they afford their housing?? No idea and I don't care... on and on... and I was just confused by the pregnancy scene. Ultimately, the film was uninteresting.

I have no nostalgia tied with the music, but I doubt that would have saved this film. The relationships were forced and unrealistic.

Grade: D

Shane

1/9/2017 04:27:37 pm

Oh! I get it! The music is like a character!

This is horribly dated and should only be watched for nostalgia reasons. It may have pushed boundaries at the time for all the sex talk, but that's more of a gimmick than something that adds to the story.

C-

Singles

C-
1.52

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