SINGLES
A film review by Bernie Rauscher
Copyright 1992 Bernie Rauscher
I saw the move SINGLES last week, and I liked it ... as entertainment. I though the cosmetic surgery CAD (Computer Aided Design) station was a blast. I really liked the main characters keeping their word on the "water date." I thought the rock club scenes really hit home with it being *impossible* to have a discussion, and the characters being just a little bit out of it in the sea of obviously just a tad over 21 crowd.
All that aside, though, I thought the group of characters were an interesting mix, --that wasn't exploited at all. In Chicago, the waitress-and-musician crowd and the suit-and-tie crowd are like oil and water. It's the same in Washington D.C. and New York. Yet, both groups come from very similar middle class backgrounds (to myopicly focus on the class depicted in the movie). Some of the rift is a simple matter of money, i.e., Fonda's and Dillon's characters shouldn't have been living in the "nice" part of town. But, part of the rift is a matter of choice and what people want out of life. Given that the characters were deciding what they were going to do with their lives, it would it would have been interesting to see what went into those choices.
Also, given that they'd been living with these choices for a few years, they could have explored the pros and cons of each. The working characters should have obviously had less free time and more constraints on their lifestyle than their "non-working" friends. The "non-working" friends should have been obviously poorer in very real ways (like not having their own roommate-less upscale apartments).
The working characters had the life style one would expect, which is the usual payback for a "professional" job. But, Dillon was talentless and Fonda was adrift. This is not usually the case. It would have been better to have given either Fonda or Dillon some real (though not necessarily marketable) talent.
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