“You see there’s nothing to do anymore… Everything decent’s been done. All the great themes in life have been used up, turned into theme parks. So I don’t really find it exactly cheerful to be living in the middle of a totally exhausted decade where there’s nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.”
This is THE movie that I credit for ushering in the 90’s.
The post-Hughesian teen dramedies of the late 80’s were getting a tad gimmicky, formulaic and Patrick Dempsey’d for my taste. More iconoclastic and introspective fare like ‘How I got Into College’ or ‘Say Anything’ were starting to tap into my very specific well of Gen-X ennui, but it wasn’t until the Slater Teen Angst Trilogy of Heathers (’88), Gleaming The Cube (’89) and Pump Up The Volume that I truly felt the generational landscape shift. This movie’s protag (Mark Hunter) sets the tone for the coming wave of slacker antiestablishmentarianism where misfits, outcasts and oddballs were the new cool.
And the soundtrack reflects this perfectly.
For my rental dollar, director Allan Moyle (who also did Empire Records and Times Square) created a seminal Voice-Of-A-Generation movie that belongs in the company of Easy Rider or Rebel Without A Cause.
It looks good on the shelf next to films like SFW and SLC Punk, but I think it’s also right at home next to the indie-cred of early-90’s Smith, Hartley, O. Russell or Araki.
Talk Hard. -Pop