Taking Sides on 90's Films Pt.1: "Swingers" vs. "Singles"

Okay, then. I have a problem with your life.

My experience of watching Swingers: this is annoying, this is annoying, ok that was kind of funny, this is annoying, this is annoying, oh wow at least it has Heather Graham in it.

IN CONCLUSION: I want to see Big Night & The Imposters.

If this were any more OTM, it would've been predicted by Nostrodamus.

Hmmmm... Hmmmm....

This would be nice if it were true, but not only is it not, Cherry Poppin' Daddies don't appear in Swingers. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy does.

Campbell Scott is better than anyone in the Swingers cast

This is true, but you'd never know it from viewing Singles.

Jon Favreau is better than Matt Dillon

Apart from his bit part in PCU and his show on IFC, I don't think I've seen Favreau in anything else. Matt Dillon has done some respectable work in his day (I'm thinking Rumble Fish and Drugstore Cowboy specifically).

Vince Vaughn is better than Matt Dillon-

Vince Vaughn is certainly funnier than Matt Dillon.

that lame shitass w/ the gun & the Sega Genesis is better than Matt Dillon

That would be the character, "Sue".

Heather Graham is better than Bridget Fonda when she's mooning over Matt Dillon

Not a huge fan of either, actually.

- Bridget Fonda giving Matt Dillon the high hat is better than Heather Graham

The high hat?

- Kyra Sedgwick is better than Favreau's annoying GF

No she's not. She's crap. And she's married to Kevin Bacon.

- that "bless you" scene bites

Very true.

- that bunny rabbit scene is great

Yes.

the only other good moment of singles is when they guy is in the phone booth and tells the drunken assholes to fuck off because it's not the bathroom.

Swingers wins out.

- Kyra Sedgwick is better than Favreau's annoying GF

No she's not. She's crap. And she's married to Kevin Bacon.

& I should've clarified that most of my "s/he better than s/he" comparisons are based on the CHARACTER, not the ACTOR.

[xpost]

Alex, that last post is so dry, I now have sand in my vagina.

OR: Roger Dodger was a great movie.

This was weird to read. I wasn't in college in 1993, but I can't imagine that swing dancing was big in Zeta at the time, you know? The revival started circa 94-95, didn't it, partly as a result of this film (I try not to think about that when judging it, either). And isn't Favreau's character a theatre actor? What else do Mikey and T do, they go to the parties they feel they're supposed to, bitch about them, leave, play video games -- frat boys do these things, but so does everyone else, right?

I recognize this point: "However, "dumb fratboy movies" != "movie made by fratboy film major", but I can't picture Swingers coming out when it did as the product of a (stereotypical) fratboy mind. Just a surprising critique, and I know nabisco has taste from what I've read of his on ilx, etc.

[xpost]

I think the "fratboy" aspect of the film N is feeling comes from the attitude of VV & Sue re: the ladies (cf. the PG-13 / R speech; the bunny rabbit speech; the Vegas encounter), & the macho chest-beating club-hopping wanna-roll thing (which really isn't that macho, as they strike me as guys TRYING to be kewl, but are just a bunch of schlubs in hipster threads trying to hide their nerdy slouch and their shyness & insecurities) (cf. the gun scene w/ Sue, which is SUCH a nerd thing to do).

For me, the film's about Favreau trying to take the "good" aspects of that macho bullshit (the self-confidence, the swagger, the derring-do) and use those things to his advantage to move on from his ex & his New York life. That bunny rabbit scene - IIRC, he catches Heather Graham at the bar, then it cuts back to Favreau, then it cuts back to the bunny in HG's spot, then back to Favreau, and then back to Heather Graham, right? That's a microcosm of that whole notion right there.

(Also, Doug Liman was the director of Swingers, not Favreau, so Blount's comp. should probably include The Bourne Identity or Go [or The O.C.!!] instead of Elf.)

Jeanne is an extremely wise and thoughtful person. It's like, "How can we convince people that the West Coast should burn?" Add in an SF, Portland and San Diego movie and there ya go.

Singles is abominable. Was then, even worse now

give in to the Swingers. It's good. Really.

Plus I doubt Swingers has a shot nearly as good as Scott and Sedgwick with the hulking Burtonesque factory-shell behind them.

so you were asleep during the closing-of-the-car-doors and walking-in-through-the-kitchen scenes? so what if they ripped them off? it's movie-love. anyway, Swingers > Goodfellas.

Perhaps. Except it, you know, sucks.

(Sorry, I just really really despise that goddamn movie. And Go for that matter.)

It still pounds Singles into the dirt.

Singles is just like a bad, two-hour episode of Love American Style with a Grunge-Lite patina.

Pro:

1. Brilliant Xavier McDaniel Cameo

2. Completely destroyed the band Mudhoney, imagine playing concerts and seeing hundreds of idiots wearing the t-shirt of the fake band in a Cameron Crowe movie that appropriated your only good song. I expect Mudhoney to go berserk and kill Cameron Crowe one day...

3. I have no quarrel with Bridget Fonda

Con:

1. Everything else in the movie, or tenuously related to the movie.

Swingers:

Pro:

1. The most brutally painful to watch scene in all of western cinema, when Jon Favreau leaves message after message on that woman's answering machine. By the third or fourth call I was screaming for God to make it stop. That scene encapsulates "pathetic" better than any other that I can think of off the top of my head.

2. "I'm going to make Gretzky's head bleed, just for super fan 99 here." For better or for worse, this documented a moment in time for a generation of males of which I am assuredly a member.

3. At the end, when Favreau dances with Heather Graham, and all of his friends immediately stop what their doing, ignoring the women they were hitting on to celebrate that their friend is back on the horse. That too is dead on accurate, at least in my experience, and I've always liked that scene.

Con:

1. Vince Vaughn continues to get work

2. The music was a tad lame, I have a soft spot for it though.

Swingers is a better film, neither of them are citizen kane, but if I had to watch one right now, unquestionably Swingers.

Matt Dillon is a very good actor. C'mon. "Over the Edge" is one of the top ten films of the last thirty years. And Matt Dillon was awesome.

This statement is completely nonsensical to me, because here's why: my experience was that 90s frattish/laddish/rakishness was wholly and completely all about insecure young males from the fucking get-go, a fact which Swingers has the capability to remind me of endlessly and at length. It's not a send-up of that guy; it is that guy, and even when I was much much closer to That Age I couldn't come close to caring about such banal workaday needing-confidence-to-get-chicks material, a topic that strikes me as so relentlessly boringly regular-old-post-college-white-guy that it needs a hell of a lot more of a twist (or a hell of a lot more of a grim-serious approach) than Swingers even came close to giving it. As an evocation of a particular kind of guy in a particular kind of time, well, I suppose it works, because yeah, I've met those guys and I've had those conversations -- only the experience was an irritation in life and even more of a smug irritation in film. It's personal, yes. But let's not get surprised by my fratboy line: this is a movie where a bunch of guys sit at home yelling at one another over hockey games and being dicks to the delivery guy. (Incidentally the private-school fratboy/filmguy is exactly what the combination suggests, exactly the parts you'd think it'd be, and pretty much exactly the type the guys in this film are.)

I haven't seen it in forever but so far as I recall it wasn't even particularly funny.

I get the sense that all Singles backlash here, on the other hand, is basically cultural, is actual prickly backlash, and kind of relies on the assumption that this was a Hot Scene movie; only one of the things I find most interesting and fantastic about it is that it seems to have gone into action before the Hot Scene, really, and so stands as one of very few major motion pictures that actually kind of beat the curve in that sense. (I don't know about place, but I think it's absolutely gorgeous in terms of catching time; details-wise I can think of few things that get that particular form of early-90s apart from weird snippets related to the Kids in the Hall!) And more importantly, well, I admit that my big supposed "flaw" with judging movies is that I look at them from a narrative perspective (and a character perspective), which evidently one is not "supposed" to do (which is stupid), and on both of those levels Singles strikes me as surprisingly rich, or at least kind of charming when it's not genuinely rich. It has a fondness for its characters that's often fascinating, insofar as it doesn't actually seem to be trying to elevate them to the level of movie-type drama or interest; it's fond of them simply for their existence, and it has a lovely array of registers in terms of taking them more seriously or less so. Which sounds like that bad Crowe softness / love-of-everything that made something like Almost Famous a bit cloying, except that in Singles it seems to me to be least forced, seems genuine, and gets poured onto something quiet and subtle enough that it leaves it warm and welcoming. This is one of maybe two dozen films that I've bothered watching more than a couple times; for some reason I've just never particularly tired of it.

I have now discussed this at semi-ridiculous length and so therefore give up except to say that I am actually genuinely disappointed in all of you; I thought I knew you; I thought you were sane; this has shattered my conception of the universe and I am entirely thrown. Singles is better, for god's sake, and I'm appalled by your naysaying. But like I say, I don't claim to know anything much about films.

I haven't seen hysterical blindness, what happens?

btw, fuck the nineties with a hammer

Hahahaha...wow!

God yes. I can't even watch this scene anymore.

OK so this is incredible (and LONG); an oral history of how Swingers got made. i had no idea just how cheap it was.
http://grantland.com/features/an-oral-history-swingers/

Wow, thx