“You know what this is like? This is like one of those 80s movies. Like one of those movies where it’s like a big group of people...” says Aubrey Plaza’s character in director Jesse Zwick’s new movie, About Alex.
She doesn’t say which 1980s movie it’s self-consciously in the shadow of, but it’s obviously the classic that invented the quarter-life crisis flick, The Big Chill.
Both are about a group of friends from college who reunite because of a crisis. In The Big Chill, it’s the suicide of a friend, Alex. In About Alex, it’s the attempted suicide of a friend, Alex.
And just as that earlier group struggled with adulthood, the same goes for the friends in About Alex.
But there’s plenty to differentiate the way things are now from what happened back in 1983. A look at how the two films compare.
