As Gouda as It Gets (2020)

I was born in 1990. That makes me a part of the millennial generation. Now, I don’t think you can clearly define generations the way people seem to want to. You can’t say millennials were born until 1996 and Gen Z was born starting in 1997 and say that people born in those two years will be completely different because of their generation. People don’t work like that. You can make generalizations about people born within a range, though. Late 90s being a blending of two generations? That makes more sense.

Anyway, millennials are typically seen as born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. That’s a twenty-year gap that would lead to vastly different experiences. I was born in 1990, which means I experienced my teenage years in the 00s, where someone born in the early 80s would experience those years in the 90s. We grew up with different music, different movies, different technology. But there are some common traits that seem to pop up with many millennials. There is a certain sense of humour that we share that never really made it to people ten years younger than I am. There are certain likes and dislikes that define our generation.

I’m not necessarily the most knowledgeable about the different generations and what separates them from others. I haven’t done any real research into them. I can only speak from experience of being a millennial and experience from seeing all the other millennials doing things on the internet. Yeah, it might not be the best bunch of reference points, but I’ve lived. I know some things about being of the generation that I’m a part of.

Anyway, I think I found a movie that encapsulates what being a millennial is all about, without being a movie like Y2K that was very “Look at what millennials were doing at the turn of the millennium with this horror comedy.” No, this was a genuine movie that wasn’t trying to capture the millennium nostalgia. It just happened to encapsulate so many things about millennials that it was striking.

As Gouda as It Gets was a romantic comedy about Brie Belanger (Kim Shaw), a small-town cheese maker who fell in love with Jack Wolfe (Clayton James), a cheese critic in town for the state’s biggest cheese festival. Brie planned on entering her smoked gouda in the festival to try and beat Lambert Farms once and for all and show that she could make the best cheese in Vermont.

There’s a lot to unpack with As Gouda as It Gets and how it perfectly captures the generalisations and stereotypes of being a millennial. What I want to do is go through five different elements of the movie that speak to that millennial idea. Five different things that you could point at and think “Yes, a millennial was behind that.” Let’s get to it then.

 

 Hallmark Romantic Comedy

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as millennials have grown into the adult stage of their lives, it has been that they love a good Hallmark romantic comedy. The popularity of this style of movie has risen as millennials have grown older. Especially the Christmas iterations of these movies. They’ve grown so popular that other companies have copied the model with their own movies. Look at how Netflix has put out numerous Christmas romantic comedies in that style.

As Gouda as It Gets wasn’t set at Christmas, but fell into many of the tropes that the Hallmark Christmas movies typically use. That’s why I considered this Hallmark romantic comedy instead of Christmas movies. There was the big city guy falling in love with the small-town girl. There was food (I’ll get into that soon). There was a minor obstacle involving the city guy’s job. Sure, there was no royalty, but it was still a Hallmark romantic comedy with many of the tropes of those movies.

 

Cheese

This is going to sound like a strange millennial trait, but millennials love cheese. Everyone likes cheese but millennials love cheese. A lot. I’ve seen millennial comedy songs about cheese. I’ve seen commercials about cheese geared towards millennials. There are more cheese flavours of snacks and more cheese options at restaurants. Millennials are spending their money on cheese and taking in entertainment about cheese. Even if you’re a millennial and you disagree with this assessment, I still say I’m right.

As Gouda as It Gets was about a woman with an artisanal cheese shop in a small town. She made cheese for a living. Her grandfather made cheese for a living. She entered her smoked gouda in a cheese festival to be judged in competition with big cheese. The guy she fell in love with was a writer who wrote about cheese. He gained fame when he was a chef and ordered too much cheese. In a panic, he made a fondue that people loved. Their lives were about cheese. The movie was about cheese. Millennials love cheese, and it came through in their writing in this Hallmark movie.

Puns

You might have noticed my three other points spaced throughout that cheese section. It’s tough to bring up one of the points without the others blending into it, like a good fondue. As Gouda as It Gets was the title of the movie, but it was also one of the oldest cheese puns. That cheese was very gouda. That sort of thing. That wasn’t where it stopped with the movie, though. There was a scene where Jack made a few cheesy puns with a fan and was called out for them. The movie wasn’t going to shy away from puns.

Now, I don’t want to say that puns are a millennials-only thing. What I will say is that as a person ages, they tend to appreciate goofy, tame humour a little more. Puns become a more amusing thing. Millennials are in their middle-age era now, so they’ve grown into the puns. Dad jokes. Stuff like that. It’s another reason why As Gouda as It Gets felt like a millennial movie. It was a pun from the title down to the name of the main characters, Brie and Jack, down to the dialogue.

Blogs

Millennials grew up as the internet became a mainstay in households. We experienced a time without regular internet access. We experienced dialup. We experienced high speed. And we experienced whatever you call the current state of the internet. As we grew and the internet grew, we witnessed the peak popularity of certain parts of the world wide web. In the days before widespread video streaming, we had text. We had music. We had text-based online games, and we had blogs. Text-based games mostly fell by the wayside, but blogs stuck around. Sure, there are different forms. Blogs became vlogs became podcasts. Blogs are still here, though. You’re reading one.

Jack Wolfe was a chef turned writer who was very involved with the cheese world. Not only did he make one of the most popular fondues ever, but he wrote a book based on that fame. That book parlayed into a successful blog, where he traveled around to try out and review cheeses. He came into town in As Gouda as It Gets for the cheese festival, tested Brie’s cheese, and blogged about it. Brie didn’t like his review of her goat cheese, and their romance blossomed from that. It blossomed from a blog post. He was a very important cheese blogger because millennials are still stuck on blogs being a big thing.

Anti-Corporation Sentiments

This one might not be a millennials-only thing. Millennials just seem to be the generation where this became a mainstream thing and not just a bit of rebellion. There’s a knowledge that big corporations are a bad thing. Rich people continue to profit off the overworking and underpaying of the working class. The quality of working conditions has been forgotten for the sake of someone with lots of money getting more money. Many millennials have been working on changing that, though a lot of it is on the lower level at this point. A lot of it is helping employees feel better and more appreciated when coming to work. It’s not much, but it’s something.

The biggest conflict in As Gouda as It Gets was that the cheese tasting competition was sponsored by the big, corporate Lambert Farms. This was the same company who opened a cheese shop to rival her grandfather’s and ran her grandfather out of the business. They had multiple cheeses in the competition and were likely to win over Brie’s gouda, unless her gouda was perfect. The new CEO of the company also tried to buy her out and threatened to open a shop on the same street to run her out of business because the board wanted representation in her small town. Corporations were the villain.

All five of these elements came together in As Gouda as It Gets to make one of the most millennial movies I can remember. It might not have been flashy about being a millennial movie, but a millennial movie shouldn’t be. If a movie is to truly represent a generation, it doesn’t point out all the stereotypes. It doesn’t wink at the audience about that generation. It simply does what that generation does.

As Gouda as It Gets didn’t try to tell the audience that it was a millennial movie. It didn’t break the fourth wall or point out any of the millennial elements it utilized. Outside the puns thing, that is. It simply used those elements, elements that have become a regular part of millennial life. That was why I thought it perfectly encapsulated millennials in movie form.

I don’t claim to know everything about the generational breakdowns of people. I don’t even really understand how we can possibly break down generations by exact years and say one generation will act one way while another will act a different way when the people could be born two years apart. In reality, there should be some crossover. I’m a millennial, though. I can speak for myself and people around my age. And I can bullshit my way through a post about people our age because I am my age. I think that’s good enough to justify all of this.

Before you go, there are a few notes:

• Romaine Waite was in both As Gouda as It Gets and Antisocial.
• Another returning actor to Sunday “Bad” Movies was Kim Shaw. She played Brie in As Gouda as It Gets, and she was in Sex and the City.
• Finally, As Gouda as It Gets featured Marc Gourdeau, who was also in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
• Have you seen As Gouda as It Gets? What did you think of it? Are there any other movies you think represent millennials without being obvious and in your face about the movie being about millennials? You can share your thoughts in the comments, or get a hold of me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Bluesky, Threads, and the comments are good places to suggest movies for me to check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m open to any suggestions you may have.
• I said in the last post that the next post was going to be for Trucks. The only reason it wasn’t was that the post was taking a little longer to write and I wanted to get a romantic comedy in for Valentine’s Day. I promise that the next post will be a post for Trucks. I’m partway through the post. It’s a snow day today. I’m bound to get some writing done. I’ll see you soon enough with that one.