Cause you know I'm the only real thing you got and I'm tired of the fantasy, because it doesn't really exist

Reality Bites (1994)
Vickie: Laney, sex is the quickest way to ruin a friendship.

Michael Grates: Have I stepped over some line in the sands of coolness with you? Because excuse me if somebody doesn't know the secret handshake with you.
Troy Dyer: There's no secret handshake. There's an IQ prerequisite, but there's no secret handshake.

Lelaina Pierce: I was really going to be somebody by the time I was 23.
Troy Dyer: Honey, all you have to be by the time you're 23, is yourself.
Lelaina Pierce: I don't know who that is anymore.
Troy Dyer: I do. And we all love her. I love her. She breaks my heart again and again. But I love her.

Troy Dyer: [answering the phone] Hello, you've reached the winter of our discontent.

Lelaina Pierce: I'd like to somehow make a difference in peoples' lives.
Troy Dyer: And I... I would like to buy them all a Coke.
Lelaina Pierce: And you wonder why we never got involved?

Troy Dyer: You can't navigate me. I may do mean things, and I may hurt you, and I may run away without your permission, and you may hate me forever, and I know that scares the living shit outta you 'cause you know I'm the only real thing you got. Lelaina: Yeah well that ain't real much.

Troy Dyer: Did he dazzle you with his extensive knowledge of mineral water? Or was it his in-depth analysis of, uh, uh, Marky Mark that finally reeled you in?

Troy Dyer: There's no point to any of this. It's all just a... a random lottery of meaningless tragedy and a series of near escapes. So I take pleasure in the details. You know... a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle... and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt.

Lelaina Pierce: I have to work around here, and unfortunately Troy, you are a master at the art of time suckage.

Troy Dyer: Well fuck me for being nice!

Lelaina Pierce: Are you religious?
Michael Grates: Um, uh, I guess uh, I guess I'm, uh a non-practicing Jew.
Lelaina Pierce: Hey, I'm a non-practicing virgin.

Troy Dyer: I'm picking up some very strange vibes. They're of the "I just got laid" variety.

Lelaina Pierce: Alright fine you wanna be in a band fine. Go ahead. Play everynight. Play three times a night! Don't just dick around the same coffee house for five years. Don't dick around with her; or with me. I mean try at something for once in your life, do something about it. But you know what? You better do it now and you better do it fast because the world doesn't owe you any favors.

Lelaina: Can you define "irony"?
Troy Dyer: It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite from the literal meaning.

Lelaina: Welcome to the world of the emtionally mature. Maybe you've seen Michael, he lives here.

Troy Dyer: [On answering machine] At the beep please leave your name, number and a brief justification for the ontological necessity of modern man's existential dilemma and^Å we'll get back to you

Vicky: My favorite part about graduating now will be dodging my student loan officer for the rest of my life. He will be in cahoots with the Columbia Record and Tape Company guy... been after my ass for years.

Troy: Well, should I get married, should I be good, should I astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and my faustushood and not take her to movies but to cemeteries and tell her stories of werewolf tongues and four clarinets... What 'Hey, That's My Bike' would like to do as a band is travel the countryside like Woody Guthrie.
Sammy: Or Richard Simmons. You know, how in his commercials he surprises people jogging...
Troy: As you can see, I have the occasional run-in with an anti-Hey-That's-My Biker and to those people I say nobody... nobody can eat 50 eggs.

Troy:: See Lainy, this is all we need. A couple of smokes, a cup of coffee, and a little bit of conversation. You and me and five bucks.
Lelaina:: You got it!

High Fidelity (2000)
Rob: Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Laura: No, it's really not, Rob. You know why? Because Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel make pop records.
Rob: Made. Made. Marvin Gaye is dead. His father shot him.

Rob: Should I bolt every time I get that feeling in my gut when I meet someone new? Well, I've been listening to my gut since I was 14 years old, and frankly speaking, I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.

Laura: I'm too tired not to be with you.
Rob: What, so if you had a bit more energy we'd stay split up, but things being as they are, with you being wiped out and all, you want to get back together? Is that it?
Laura: Yeah.

Laura: Listen, Rob, would you have sex with me? Because I want to feel something else than this. It either that, or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm.
Rob: No. I only have a few left, I've been saving them for later.
Laura: Right. It'll have to be sex, then.
Rob: Right. Right.

Rob: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

Rob: It would be nice to think that since I was 14, times have changed. Relationships have become more sophisticated. Females less cruel. Skins thicker. Instincts more developed. But there seems to be an element of that afternoon in everything that's happened to me since. All my romantic stories are a scrambled version of that first one.

Rob: Sometimes I got so bored of trying to touch her breast that I would try to touch her between her legs. It was like trying to borrow a dollar, getting turned down, and asking for 50 grand instead.

Rob: I can see now I never really committed to Laura. I always had one foot out the door, and that prevented me from doing a lot of things, like thinking about my future and... I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing, keep my options open. And that's suicide. By tiny, tiny increments.

Rob: If you *really* wanted to screw me up, you should've gotten to me earlier.

Rob: [lying in bed imagining the scene] You are as abandoned and noisy as any character in a porn film, Laura. You are Ian's plaything, responding to his touch with shrieks of orgasmic delight. No woman in the history of the world is having better sex than sex you are having with Ian... in my head.

Rob: The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules. Anyway... I've started to make a tape... in my head... for Laura. Full of stuff she likes. Full of stuff that make her happy. For the first time I can sort of see how that is done.

Rob: John Dillinger was killed behind that theater in a hale of FBI gunfire. And do you know who tipped them off? His fucking girlfriend. All he wanted to do was go to the movies.

Rob: My desert island, all-time, top-five most memorable breakups, in chronological order, are as follows: Alison Ashmore; Penny Hardwick; Jackie Alden; Charlie Nicholson; and Sarah Kendrew. Those were the ones that really hurt. Can you see your name on that list, Laura? Maybe you'd sneak into the top ten. But there's just no room for you in the top five, sorry. Those places are reserved for the kind of humiliation and heartbreak you're just not capable of delivering.

Rob: I could've wound up having sex back there. And what better way to exorcise rejection demons than to screw the person who rejected you, right? But you wouldn't be sleeping with a person, you'd be sleeping with the whole sad, single-person culture. It'd be like sleeping with Talia Shire in Rocky if you weren't Rocky.

Rob: It made sense to pool our collective loathing for the opposite sex, and while we were at it, you get to share a bed with somebody at the same time. We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26, and we were of that disposition.

Rob: What if I was doing something that can't be cancelled?
Laura: Rob, what are you ever doing that can't be cancelled?

Rob: I'm tired of the fantasy, because it doesn't really exist. And there are never really any surprises, and it never really...
Laura: Delivers?
Rob: Delivers. And I'm tired of it. And I'm tired of everything else for that matter. But I don't ever seem to get tired of you, so...

Rob: Top five things I miss about Laura. One; sense of humor. Very dry, but it can also be warm and forgiving. And she's got one of the best all time laughs in the history of all time laughs, she laughs with her entire body. Two; she's got character. Or at least she had character before the Ian nightmare. She's loyal and honest, and she doesn't even take it out on people when she's having a bad day. That's character.
[holds up three fingers]
Rob: Three;
[long pause, hesitantly]
Rob: I miss her smell, and the way she tastes. It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.
[shakes his head, recollecting, then looks back and lip synchs 'four' while holds up four fingers]
Rob: I really dig how she walks around. It's like she doesn't care how she looks or what she projects and it's not that she doesn't care it's just, she's not affected I guess, and that gives her grace. And five; she does this thing in bed when she can't get to sleep, she kinda half moans and then rubs her feet together an equal number of times... it just kills me. Believe me, I mean, I could do a top five things about her that drive me crazy but it's just your garden variety women you know, schizo stuff and that's the kind of thing that got me here.

Ask and yee shall recieve... sorta. Thanks for the blast from the past. I couldn't very well repost the quotes of garden state that ain't my style and in my opinion they're not in the same catagory. I loved "Reality Bites" though, I saw it in theaters my freshman year of high school. There were a bunch of movies with a similiar theme though. Reality Bites, Threesome, Singles, SLC Punk, and Philidelphia which pushed the envelope on safe sex, Aids, and homosexuality. The 90's were like that, that's when Magic Johnson (a famous basketball player) was diagnosed with Aids and a variety of Homosexual movements were being more publicized. Garden State is a better movie then Reality Bites, it has a message that goes across generations where as Reality Bites is basically my MTV, lash out against our parents, lash out against society, generation x, sexual liberated, not free love but casual sex. I know for a fact that all of us who graduated with a degree that we're not effectively using relate to Vicky's line that I couldn't find but it's when they're on the roof after graduation and she's like my social security number that's all I learned in college.

The soundtrack alone is a giant driving factor. I can say a lot about Reality Bites. We love Troy! Troy says so many things in that movie that your just not suppose to say. Talk about saying the wrong thing at inappreprate times, dudes king for drama king stuff. The thing that Reality Bites and High Fidelity have in common is their both evolved slacker movies. The main charachters are doing just enough to get by, even though Laina in theory wants more by the end she's back to a similar position as Troy and she admires Troy as do we all. Troy is the shit! Rob is too. Why? Cause they voice they're slackerness in a lovely elequient way that seems knowledgeable. They are slackers elite.

One thing I've always appreciated about Reality Bites is the cherished friendship that as soon as a physical relationship, like Vicky says "sex is the quickest way to ruin a friendship". It rings true. I don't want it to, as a matter of fact if I look back I'd rather still love the friends that I have had sex with as friends then watch it turn to shit after that interaction. That thingy, you know, how you start liking someone so much that sex is the only place it's gonna end up. Wouldn't it be nice if "You know... a quarter-pounder with cheese, those are good, the sky about ten minutes before it starts to rain, the moment where your laughter become a cackle... and I, I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt." was enough to last. "a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarette's, 5 bucks..." I recall taking short walks and sitting on street curbs and that was enough ya know, enough to just cherish whoever's company you would share it with. Those were the good times, memorable and such.

One other commonality I ponder about the two flicks mentioned as well is maturity. The title alone says it in one "Reality Bites", fuck yeah it does! On a personal level it states things that I've said before about your own illusions verses dun dun dun... the reality. I think maturity is directly related to reality. The concept of how much reality bites is a question of how mature according to societal standards you are. In both cases Troy and Rob aren't suited for reality, Rob however by powers that be chooses to change from suitable influence of his girlfriend. Laina even though she does make a lovely editted video is more likely to lean toward less maturity through troy's influence, which I might add is the happy ending that 90's movies are themed for.

Side note for all readers, good movies to see which I haven't discussed cause there like in french "Je Vais Bien Ne T'en Fais pas" and "Love Me If You Dare". Je Vais Bien Ne T'en Fais Pas has this killer track called Lili (U-turn) by Aaron in it which I didn't know. There I was watching it and smack dab in the middle of the movie there it was. Kick Ass! There's a good spanish movie too called Y Mu Mama Tambien. Till next time.