It didn’t mean “Safe For Work” back then.
This is a movie for the nihilist in all of us. A big, loud, obnoxiously sarcastic middle finger to… everything.
Because everything is lame, everything sucks, and if you were the right age in 1994, this felt absolutely true. If this movie had anything to say to us Doc Martin-wearing rebels without causes, it’s that it had absolutely nothing at all to say. And it owns that nothing.
Afterall, why should we listen to what movies have to say? Especially TV? It’s all fake manipulative consumerist propaganda. So effin’ What, indeed. Stop listening to people on camera. Just stop caring about what the media is trying to get you to think. Stop getting lost in that hopeless little screen. And don’t take everything so seriously.
Or like, whatever.
Anyway, even though it regularly gets overshadowed by its cuddlier Slacker contemporaries like Singles (1992) or Reality Bites (1994), it’s no less a fun work of peak ultra 90’s complete with appropriate “in your face” edgy soundtrack.
Seriously, the soundtrack is perfection.
I’ve always had a real soft spot for this angsty militant Slacker manifesto that also doubles as a sneering attack on mass-media manipulation and idealization.
Because when all is said and done, media literacy actually does matter, and this movie’s trying real hard teach you a thing or two.
It just won’t admit it.
It was clearly aiming to sit on the shelf with the likes of Heathers or Natural Born Killers, but I think it earned a place somewhere between Pump Up The Volume (1990) and Airheads (1994).
-Pop
S.F.W. arrived on Home Video this week in 1995, after an October 14th, 1994 theatrical release.