Casablanca. Rebel Without a Cause. Easy Rider. Saturday Night Fever. The Big Chill. Every generation has a film or two that helped define it.
Few movies tried to do it with their own tagline.
“The Generation X comedy,” indeed.
Only a handful of people seem to remember Don’t Do It (1994) and to be honest, it wasn’t the kind of movie you rented twice. But if you were there, really there – in that Docs-and-flannel, post-Singles, pre-Friends emotional dead zone, you might’ve caught it on cable at 2AM and thought, Yeah. That feels about right.
So yeah, it’s like budget Singles but without the stellar soundtrack. It wasn’t a comedy, exactly – but it wouldn’t pass muster as a drama, it was more like a 90-minute anxiety spiral about twenty-somethings sleepwalking through their relationships, screwing each other’s exes, and lying just enough to wreck whatever small thing might still be working. Like a lot of us slackers in the early 90, it just sort of… passively aggressively meandered.
You had Heather Graham and Sheryl Lee at peak pixie quirk. James Le Gros and Esai Morales trading wide-eyed monologues about trust and betrayal. Balthazar Getty skulking through familiar post-adolescent emotional baggage. It was like someone raided the ’90s “new-hotness” casting folder for any up-and-comers working for scale.
The emotional stakes stay low-grade, but there’s an indie confessional quality underneath – the kind of honesty you only get from a twenty-something talking to another twenty-something.
Don’t Do It did it, and did it well. Well, well enough. And if it sometimes feels like it was funded on maxed-out credit cards and pizza deliveries, that’s just one of its more endearing qualities.
-Pop