YMMV / Reality Bites

• Designated Hero:
  • The main characters are essentially whiny brats who complain about having privileged lives and have no qualms about hurting the people that care about them just because they're "above it all."
  • Troy especially, who can be condescending, smugly loves how clever he is, and is almost proto-hipster-like in his dislike for The Man, yet the film seems to want the audience to root for him to get together with Lelaina, not Michael, a perfectly nice and even Adorkable guy because...he is a yuppie? He has a good job?
• Designated Villain: Although he's supposed to be the film's "bad guy," many viewers consider Michael to be the most sympathetic character in the movie.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Michael for one as a sympathetic character. Then there is Sammy and Vicki for having more pleasant personalities and more interesting conflicts.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: After quitting her job, Leilana pays her bills by charging them all to her dad's card he loaned her for gas, a "solution" to her unemployment that obviously won't work because her father can see the charges and calls her at the end asking her why he's being billed $900. So inevitably Leilana will have to pay it all back and go back to job hunting anyway.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Most fans prefer Lelaina/Michael over Lelaina/Troy. The film clearly wants you to root for Lelaina to get together with Troy, although he's really a terrible choice in every single way. Michael, on the other hand, is a nice guy who has a job, but because of that, that makes him a sell-out to "The Man" who should be dumped.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: For Stranger Things fans, this is a movie about Robin's dad dating Joyce.
• One-Scene Wonder: The people Leilana meets while applying for the job. Andy Dick, Keith David, Anne Meara (Stiller's real-life mother), and David Spade make memorable appearances for one single scene due to their hilarious excuses and offers they make to her.
• Retroactive Recognition: Renée Zellweger has an unspoken role early in the film as one of Troy's groupies.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film was held up as a near-perfect snapshot of 90s youth culture and Generation X angst when it first came out in 1994. However, this would end up working against it as time marched on, as some of the subjects the film addressed (such as Sammy's gayngst and Vickie's AIDS scare) have become old hat. Moreover, the characters' First-World Problems and hipster-esque railings against suburban middle-class normality because they have nothing else to rail against can come across as much less sympathetic after the War on Terror and the Great Recession of 2008 came around. In short, Reality Bites hasn't aged well due to being a product of a time that didn't really feel like it had quite as many "real" problems in hindsight (at least when compared to the 2000s and 2010s).
• Values Dissonance: Lindsay Ellis mentioned the film in her review of RENT, pointing out that in the nineties when it and RENT were set, rejecting jobs for being "above it all" might have seemed snobbish, but post-2008 economic collapse, it makes them come off as entitled brats.

---