I got a letter last week heralding my upcoming high school reunion. I quickly skimmed in spite, then satisfyingly crumpled up the paper and threw it away. But should we already be here?? Ten years ago I remember seeing Grosse Pointe Blank , Beautiful Girls, and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. All three prominently featured the ten-year high school reunion, and I saw all three the year I graduated high school. I figured I would someday either be killing people for money, shoveling snow, or falsely claiming to have invented the post-it note. One thing for certain, though - I would be dreading my impending thirties and regretting my lost youth. Am I dreading my thirties? I don’t know, not really. I guess I have some angst, but whatever. Nothing new.

I’m more ticked that my generation has yet to produce some type of seminal movie based on my generation. When do we nineties kids get our own Dazed & Confused or Almost Famous? I’ve been living off borrowed nostaliga from the sixties, seventies, and eighties. In Grosse Pointe, Minnie Driver has posters of The Clash in her old childhood bedroom. The guys in Beautiful Girls sing ‘Sweet Caroline’. I bought both Dazed & Confused soundtracks before I left for college.

I want to see a movie in which the characters grew up listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, et al. And no, Singles doesn’t count, as those people were roughly the age I am now, listening to music of the period that is part of my youth. The guys from Citizen Dick probably grew up on Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.

Is it that my generation doesn’t have much to add? Or is it that the whole ‘remembering a period from my youth’ thing over and done? We grew up on those movies, and our own would look like a cheap parody?

There’s a scene in one of the last episodes of Six Feet Under, in which Claire is remembering being only 12 or so. She walks in on her brother Nate who is smoking pot, listening to ‘All Apologies’ and crying. Kurt Cobain had just died. In the present, Claire is dealing with her own grief as Nate has just died. She didn’t completely understand at the time why Nate was sad but it makes more sense to her as she becomes an adult.

This is maybe the only example I can think of right now in which my generation is dealing with something real from our youth - and even it is borrowing from our older brothers…