Mixtape Review: A Nostalgic Coming-of-Age Tale — Full Breakdown & Transcript

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[00:13] so stick around to the end of the video to learn more. Mixed Space is joyful homage to angsty coming-of-age stories like The Breakfast Club or Reality Bias, crossed with the music-led narration of something like High Fidelity. Those films and or books were made to give voice to the confusion of youth,

[00:27] be it high school youth or the prolonged adolescence that began to emerge with the arrival of Gen X, those works, and those like them, were awkwardly asking awkward questions and arriving at awkward answers, because, asked in that moment, everyone was still figuring it out.

[00:40] They were earnest explorations of a confusing time. Mixtape is different. It's not feeling its way through confusion, and there's no awkwardness to it. It's a dreamy, romanticized rendition of youth at the inflection point before adolescence.

[00:52] It's a suburban American fairy tale where the greatest struggle a young person faces is an overly strict parent, or someone feeling a little bit insecure about living in an older sibling's shadow. Can you be as cool as your sister who had a wild reputation for being a legendary party animal?

[01:05] And don't get me started on how embarrassing it is when Slater's mom offers him and his 17-year-old friend a round of margaritas. No, Paul, don't offer my friend cocktails. Here. Mixtape is heartfelt and beautiful and at times poignant, but almost always charming and funny and uplifting.

[01:20] It's laced with fairly minor tensions and angst because they're not really the focus of the story, where other coming-of-age stories set or made in this time period centre on angst, Mixtape is centred on joy. The question of tomorrow is a question for tomorrow,

[01:34] and this last day together is all about remembering the moments that define their brief time together. That's what Mixtape is, essentially, a collection of brief, interactive vignettes

[01:46] with the characters remembering some big or small moment. Playing a safety railroad much of the time is spent in your room or the rooms of your two friends, Cassandra and Slater. And yes he actually does kind of talk like that.

[01:58] I was a tree in my leaf boa. Would that be like my hair falling out or my skin falling off? While just hanging out you'll pick through the typical sort of stuff you'd find in a teenager's bedroom. CDs, posters, clothes, Polaroids and while many of them will only serve up a brief clip from Stacey or her buddy,

[02:15] some of them will trigger these flashback memories transporting you across time and space taking all manner of creative license in the retelling of some scaring shenanigans or some tender moment. A shopping cart chase across town that gets you featured on the 6 o'clock news.

[02:28] I've been reporting in the field for well over 40 years now, and I've only seen her five or six times. That time you told a friend something that you'd never told anyone else before. Most of the time, if I don't have music on,

[02:40] I get to panic. What's the panic? Like, time feels like it's drifting by. And yes, even your first kiss.

[02:53] This is what is so lovable about Mixtape and why it works so well. It takes moments from our teenage years and not only lets us relive them, but it makes them playable and exaggerates them such that we're not just joyriding in a convertible,

[03:05] we also conducting the fireworks with little more than finger and imagination imagination

[03:18] The word playable certainly has its limits though, and you've no doubt already seen them throughout this video. I know there's a not insignificant portion of people who really need their games to be very playable video games, quite separate from movies or interactive

[03:30] novels or walking simulators or whatever. Mixtape definitely isn't for you. While its brief interactive segments are playable, there's never too much to them. Steering the shopping cart is just about pressing left or right and then choosing if you might want to spin

[03:43] because it looks cool. Bounding over a field requires nothing more than the press of a button from time to time, and even that's entirely optional. The most playable section is this one, a rock skipping section that offers up a number of different targets. You don't have to hit any of them by the way, since doing so doesn't give you anything,

[03:57] but it's fun nonetheless. I shall deny I ever was here. These sequences are all composed of a few key elements. Firstly, they look stunning. Mixtapes arrive with a clever art style that uses more photo-realistic looking backgrounds

[04:12] running at full framerate, and overlaid are these very starlight characters moving at this almost stop motion framerate. It's kind of perfect both visually and thematically, since the authenticity of the environments grounds the fantasy, while the starlight characters subtly remind you that this is just a fairy

[04:27] tale after all. Secondly, these sequences all have a killer soundtrack, and there is a reason for that. See, Stacy is leaving town because she's off to New York City to become a music supervisor. What's a music supervisor, you ask?

[04:39] That's a great question, Slater. Imagine before you all the music of human history. Every sonnet, symphony, rock song, and radio jingle. A vast gallery of sound.

[04:52] This is the domain of the music supervisor. It's their job to curate a soundtrack that frames and elevates the narrative, whether it's a film, a play, or a television program.

[05:04] Stacey Rockford has wanted to be a music supervisor since eighth grade. I told her mixtapes are spectacular, though I've never heard one myself. This can allow Stacey to score this little collection of vignettes in each new song like this.

[05:17] The next track is Just Like Honey by the Jesus and Mary James. A perfect bedroom hangout bar. Might be the last time we're all in my room together. Huh.

[05:29] An eclectic soundtrack of over 20 licensed tracks will clearly leave its mark on you, to be honest. And I'm going to go on a tangent here, because I don't give a fuck. Mixtape is that rare game that has the willingness and budget to utilize licensed music.

[05:41] I'm sure many more games would love to do it if they could, but they can't, because the legal steps are too humorous and the costs too prohibitive. I think about when Mixtape is set, a time before the arrival of streaming services, when people still listen to the radio,

[05:53] still went to movie theaters, still rented from Blockbuster. This was the final age of the monoculture, before the algorithms would divide us. Not in a partisan sense, but in the sense that we're all just staying in our own language now, listening and watching whatever the self-reinforcing algorithm feeds us,

[06:08] all of it intended to conform to our taste rather than challenge or expand them. I think about this past decade when content creation has exploded and podcasts and overtaken radio as the main distribution channel for the spoken word. In that era the record labels closely guarded their treasures like dragons on mounds of gold I think about how much more rich and interesting the entire content creation landscape would have been if we had the ability to utilize even small segments of live music

[06:31] without losing the entire revenue for a video. Think of how much more content creators could have said if they could have used music to say it. I reflect on all this because we could have all been music supervisors had the record company let us.

[06:44] And I'm jealous that Mixtape gets to use music in ways that most of us are not allowed to and it uses it to absolutely magnificent effect. The visual spectacle and simple gameplay looks very impressive, but they feel like cups waiting to be filled, and you could have filled them with other music, but this is a story about hipsters, before the term hipster even existed. There is no high fidelity without the hi-fi, there is no mixtape without the mixtape.

[07:06] Well I've been there in a hurry, and I've been thinking. Taken as a beautifully scored American fairy tale, Mixtape is delightful, and I really enjoyed it and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

[07:20] But I will admit, I was hoping for another layer to it that never quite materialized. Mixtape is a love letter to coming-of-age cinema, and like a love letter, it renders something perfect, idyllic, mythologized, but also somewhat distant from the truth, and that distance will likely determine how connected you feel to Mixtape's settings, characters, and events.

[07:37] Any of those other icy coming-of-age stories felt born of the same confusion and uncertainty that the stories themselves were chronicling. If you go back and watch or read them, some of them haven't aged super well, and that's a good thing, because it meant that they were trying new things, uncomfortable things, risky things.

[07:51] Mixtape isn't possessed of the same scrappy, experimental, confused, awkward spirit. On the contrary, it feels polished, and dare I say, a little sanitized. Nostalgia adds new smoothness to memory, accentuating the positives, obscuring the negatives.

[08:03] is Mixtape is a nostalgic remembering of youth rather than youth itself. It has about it a natural, inevitable confidence that all will be well because the people writing it are old and wise enough to know that it will be.

[08:15] And that's quite antithetical to the confusion and uncertainty that some of the characters are trying to lay claim to. This glossy rendition of youth isn't accidental, by the way. I mean, the characters even reference it at certain points. I'm like pouring in like a fucking cereal commercial.

[08:29] But does Mixtape have an obligation to be heavier than this to render a more realistic depiction of youth? I certainly don't think it does, but I do think that Mixtape kind of wants to have its cake and eat it too, at least a little. It wants to present its main characters as trouble

[08:42] without really giving them any trouble. It wants to adopt the air of angst when all the characters are already pretty clear on who they are or aren't and where they are or are not headed. As such, many of Mixtape's most impactful story threads

[08:54] don't land as strongly as they could have. Much of it centers on a planned road trip to LA, which won't happen now because the main character, Stacy, is leaving town tomorrow, the road trip was planned for next week, and it's never really explained why Stacey could have just delayed her departure for a week to keep her promise

[09:09] to her friends. Other main story threads about unrequited affection also remain unresolved, and not in a deliberate way, since these coming-of-age stories often revel in the significance of the half-said goodbye, or about Mixtape not knowing how to land the sort of jab that leaves

[09:21] you yearning for the knockout punch that never comes. As much as I enjoyed Mixtape, I do think about what it might have been had it been willing to let its characters hurt a little more, and let that pain remain even as the credits rolled.

[09:33] Also think about what Mixpaint might have been able to say as a text in dialogue with its inspirations The awkward unanswered questions of that era are now fully answered since the film studies student probably got a job in IT sales and where kids back then were hoping to get jobs as music supervisors

[09:47] and now probably hope to become TikTok influencers. Does an era obsessed with never selling out look wise or naive in this modern era, where the term selling out is so thoroughly vanquished that this is probably the first time you've heard it in over a decade?

[09:59] I'm left wondering this. At 17, Stacey is loose, judgmental, arrogant, her worldview is completely impenetrable because nothing is trying to pierce it, but she's also kind and curious and earnest, and I suspect her useful arrogance and bravado will naturally give way to a wisdom and humility that comes with age.

[10:16] My question then is this, would Stacey have liked mixtape? I suspect 17 year old Stacey wouldn't have. I expect she'd turn up her nose at it, dismissing its creamy idealized quality as tripe, and no matter how good the soundtrack is, I'm

[10:29] sure she imagines she could have curated a better one. But that older Stacey, I think she'd get it. I think she'd appreciate its historical tourism and laugh at herself a little since it all seemed so important back then, but none of it really was. I think she'd

[10:42] appreciate these cherry-picked memories reimagined with exaggerated beauty and heroism. 17 year old Stacey lived on the B-side. But as you get older, you're more than happy with a remastered greatest hit compilation. And that's what Mixtape is. And it's great, and I recommend it.

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