mid90s (2018)
Directed by Jonah Hill
In 1990s Los Angeles, a 13-year-old spends his summer navigating between a troubled home life and a crew of new friends he meets at a skate shop.
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There are also shades of Larry Clark’s Kids, but the difference here is that Hill is careful to never be moralising or overly sensationalist, choosing instead to treat his protagonists with a great deal of tenderness and understanding.
Unwholesome, sure, but arguably no more so than Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre , two better-written Gothic romances about young women in thrall to a remote, charismatic, often cruel hero.
As queasy as Clark’s Kids or Bully are, the conversations between the kids in Mid90s also prove squirm-inducing.
“Mid90’s” almost feels like a soft remake of “Kids” at times, leaning toward almost ripping whole pages from “Wassup Rockers.”
Someone like Linklater can carry off intelligent teen dialogue without it seeming forced in films like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!! , but in Mid90s the sincere moments, like the one where Ray sits Stevie down and has a heart-to-heart about his family, come off as scripted and trite.
“Mid90s” is like “Dazed and Confused” (1993) crossed with “Kids” (1995), “Freaks and Geeks” (1999), “Dogtown and Z-Boys” (2001), and “Slackers” (2002), with a sprinkling of this year’s “Eighth Grade.”
In the end Richard Linklater seems the most obvious inspiration for this lo-fi but artistically ambitious indie focusing on a group of Los Angeles skateboarders, with Hill channelling Dazed and Confused and Slacker and Kevin Smith's Clerks .
Mid90s eschews the larkish qualities of a 1980s teen sex comedy or the fondness of Richard Linklater films such as Boyhood or Dazed and Confused .
À la fois un jouissif « hang out movie » à la Dazed and Confused et le meilleur film que Xavier Dolan n’a jamais réalisé, on sent surtout que Mid90s est du pur Jonah Hill.
Films like American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused try to explore the past with youthful eyes and a determined lack of nostalgia.
In the end Richard Linklater seems the most obvious inspiration for this lo-fi but artistically ambitious indie focusing on a group of Los Angeles skateboarders, with Hill channelling Dazed and Confused and Slacker and Kevin Smith's Clerks .
His directorial style is naturalistic, containing echoes of Larry Clark’s Kids (writer Harmony Korine makes a cameo appearance) and Richard Linklater’s Slacker ; every scene feels as if he started rolling the moment the boys showed up and started hanging out.
Shot on 16mm film with a retro 4:3 aspect ratio by Christopher Blauvelt, it’s grainy and naturalistic – a kind of cross between Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Larry Clark’s Kids , but with added profanity.
It’s as if Hill took his familiar sly humor and sneaked it into a segment from Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood.”
A similar cinema of nostalgia worked for Richard Linklater’s Boyhood .
While the coming-of-age of male adolescents has been robustly explored (not least by Linklater himself in the tricky to top Boyhood ), as a writer-director Hill doesn't exactly play it safe.
Compare Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” which “Mid90s” is certainly trying to evoke in microcosm (just compare the posters).
Mid90s eschews the larkish qualities of a 1980s teen sex comedy or the fondness of Richard Linklater films such as Boyhood or Dazed and Confused .
Someone like Linklater can carry off intelligent teen dialogue without it seeming forced in films like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!! , but in Mid90s the sincere moments, like the one where Ray sits Stevie down and has a heart-to-heart about his family, come off as scripted and trite.
Hill has noted that he was inspired by harsher pics like Larry Clark’s Kids (scripted by Harmony Korine) and Shane Meadows’ This Is England , and the non-judgmental perspectives of those films are carried over here, meaning that we watch uncritically as a bunch of uncomfortably young lads get up to all sorts of particularly LA-type mischief.
If anything, the heart of the film strikes closer to Elephant, where every moment is captured in rapid fire constant motion (not to mention both films feature cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt), or This is England, where the cast comes across as a random group of people rather than a gaggle of well trained actors.
Hill has spoken of the influence of both Shane Meadows’ This Is England and largely forgotten kids flick The Sandlot Kids as his inspiration.
Imagine a latter-day, West Coast “Clerks,” but filmed in color and not quite as desperate to prove how clever it is, and you’ve got an idea of the easy, embraceable tone of “Mid90s.”
In the end Richard Linklater seems the most obvious inspiration for this lo-fi but artistically ambitious indie focusing on a group of Los Angeles skateboarders, with Hill channelling Dazed and Confused and Slacker and Kevin Smith's Clerks .
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Hill’s debut has drawn a lot of comparison to the no-filter styling of director Larry Clark, and it also easily calls to mind Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park.
He tips his hat here to Van Sant’s dreamy 2007 skateboarding drama “Paranoid Park,” borrowing the boxy aspect ratio and attempting similarly lyrical interludes while studiously avoiding that film’s sinister undercurrents.
Ebiri points out the Scorsesian strain of “bodily mortification” in the film, referencing “Raging Bull” and “Wolf of Wall Street” as influences (Hill nabbed his second Oscar nod for the latter).
The idea of bodily mortification — through rage, through shame, through hedonism — runs through many of Scorsese’s films, most notably Raging Bull and The Wolf of Wall Street (which co-starred Hill).
With this kind of lo-fi veracity, the obvious touchstone might be Larry Clark’s Kids , but mid90s has more the feel of early Scorsese — chiefly Who’s That Knocking At My Door — a loosely plotted, character-driven piece that documents the rites of passage and rituals of teenage LA life circa 1995.
Somewhere between Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Larry Clark’s Kids , Mid90s , which just debuted at the New York Film Festival ahead of an October 19 theatrical release, takes place in a low-rent part of Los Angeles where Stevie (an affecting Sunny Suljic), a prepubescent boy of about twelve, is growing up with an abusive, much older brother (Lucas Hedges) and a kindly but spacey mom (Katherine Waterston).
The austere style, the oblique plotting, the understated performances — this isn’t exactly Mean Streets we’re talking about here.
Yet Hill’s take on coming of age is nowhere near as prurient or sinister as Korine’s, and its portrayal of carefree teen mavericks recalls something more like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey or Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen.
With other films like American Honey , A Ghost Story , and First Reformed embracing the archaic, once television-friendly frame it would appear that A24 knows something that we do not.
Juxtapose all of this with something like Andrea Arnold’s American Honey or Sean Baker’s dual whammy of Tangerine and The Florida Project , and for all its narrative passion and visual eloquence (vaunted cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt shoots things with a magnetic attention to detail that’s riveting) Mid90s almost can’t help but come up short.
It lacks the authenticity of Catherine Hardwicke’s Los Angeles-set Lords of Dogtown (2005), whose story about hopeless boys was, unexpectedly, even more convincingly empathetic than her female-puberty debut Thirteen had been.
It’s true that Hill pulls from the great dramatic skate movies — Larry Clark’s Kids and Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown come to mind — and that his film comes amidst a revival of the genre, with films like Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap pushing it to the forefront of the film industry, but that’s hardly his fault that a trend coalesced before he even screened the thing publicly.
Mid90s is strongly analogous to Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen and especially last year's Skate Kitchen, written and directed by Crystal Moselle.
It lacks the authenticity of Catherine Hardwicke’s Los Angeles-set Lords of Dogtown (2005), whose story about hopeless boys was, unexpectedly, even more convincingly empathetic than her female-puberty debut Thirteen had been.
From a different, if related angle, “Mid90s” feels in keeping with another Angeleno coming-of-age drama, this one following an innocent young woman destroying herself to be cool: Catherine Hardwicke’s “Thirteen” from 2003.
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“Mid90s'” captures a people and a place with the ring of the authentic, a grimly realistic depiction of skateboard culture in the working class LA where it blew up in the “Dogtown and Z-Boys” era.
“Mid90s” is like “Dazed and Confused” (1993) crossed with “Kids” (1995), “Freaks and Geeks” (1999), “Dogtown and Z-Boys” (2001), and “Slackers” (2002), with a sprinkling of this year’s “Eighth Grade.”
Channeling Antoine Doinel in “The 400 Blows,” he grounds the movie’s by-the-numbers trajectory with an authenticity that elevates it.
It’s not Truffaut, but The 400 Blows comes to mind, not only because Stevie seems to take that many hits from his brother, but also because he’s as tough and resilient as the young Antoine Doinel (though his heroes are along the line of Tony Hawk, not Balzac).
But though the film has some dramatic intensity, especially a visceral take on a mishap involving a car, and several very Scorsese-ish interludes in which the dialogue is turned down while the musical score takes over, it lacks the self-confronting honesty of a finely considered bildungsroman or such cinematic equivalents as François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows .