The movie was made in 1996, yet the cars seemed older than that, and most of the phoning was done on corded phones of an even older vintage. There were a couple of cordless phones, but they looked like earlier models. Was the film intended to depict a time before 1996?
vmwrites
I don't think so.
share[deleted]
Convention? What convention?
I really did like Tree Lounge. I was just puzzled by the props. Thanks for the answer.
vmwrites
[deleted]
My mother-in-law still has a corded phone. Maybe you're not old enough to remember when these things were commonplace. People didn't just get rid of all their corded phones and run right out and buy cordless phones when they hit the market. I still had a corded phone until 2001. It wasn't necessary for every phone in my house to be cordless, and GOOD quality cordless phones are a pretty recent phenomenon. My parents had a cordless phone in the 90s and the reception on it SUCKED. Those old 900MHZ analog cordless phones were awful. You couldn't be more than 25 feet from the base before you started picking up static, and it wasn't uncommon for our neighbor's cordless signal to bleed over into ours.
At any rate, what you're seeing in this movie is primarily solid middle-class blue-collar type folks, the kind of people who don't have money to replace everything they own whenever the latest, greatest version comes out. They're not going to go out and buy all new cordless phones when their current phones work just fine. They're not going to run out and buy the latest 1996-models cars when their 1989 or 1991 models still run just fine. Tommy in particular owns an older car because it's all he can afford.
Actually, I'm 61 and plenty old enough. Thanks for the seminar on corded and cordless phones. We still have several corded phones in our house, which is insurance, when the power goes off. They still work, while cordless phones are useless.
My original point was to try to identify when the movie took place. Throughout the movie, I saw NO cordless or cell phones being used by anyone. That meant that the story was probably supposed to take place in the 60's or 70's. If I had seen one or two cordless phones in the film, I would have placed the story later on, and if cell phones were used (say, by people in the street), it would have taken place even later.
I often use props to identify when a story takes place. Other props might include refrigerators, cars, televisions, etc. Women, for example, often use clothing fashions, to pinpoint when a story takes place. The shirtwaist dress was worn in the 50's, "sack dress" was popular back in the early 60's, the miniskirt later, the midi after that, and so on.
vmwrites
Not sure how you reckon the story took place in the 60s or 70s. For one, I recall there was a cordless phone used in at least one scene, but I don't have the movie in my possession to verify. [EDIT: I think it was the scene inside Mike's house -- and its contemporary design, layout and furniture, by the way -- the scene with the high school girls.] Second, most of the cars are of late 80s/early 90s vintage, which is what a solid majority of people were still driving when this was filmed (1995). The exceptions are Tommy's barely-running late-70s Nova -- used to emphasize his financial state, not to place the movie in a late 70s time frame -- and Rob's muscle-car-era classic convertible, the stereotypical wrench-monkey's "dream car." Finally, cell phones were still pretty expensive and not nearly as commonplace in the mid-90s as they are now, particularly not in a middle-clss blue-collar setting. In the mid-90s cell phones were still primarily the tools of business folks and the otherwise self-important.
shareYes, there's one of those angular AT&T cordless phones from the ealry 90s in the house when they have the girls over.
Its clearly taking place in the mid-90s. There are a few perfectly contemporary cars (mostly passing by) for example, but most stuff of all sorts is a couple years old, like actual people would have.