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🎙️ EPISODE 459: 05.04.22
This never quite came together for me, but it's intriguing in moments. A funny thing to do when Lucas Hedges hard-ass older brother inflection gets too much to bear, or when you can't stomach another flood of n- and f-words, or when the very "mid90s" soundtrack is too on the nose, is to imagine a young Jonah Hill in the place of Sunny Suljic. Picture a young Jonah, several years prior to Superbad (whatever that looks like lol) trying to skateboard with a bunch of raw, unfiltered Los Angeles teens. I have no reason to believe any portion of this was autobiographical, but it's funny to pretend that it is. So let's talk about Jonah!
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I feel like I wanna be unnecessarily harsh towards him because it's easy for these ventures to be perceived as vanity projects. Not everyone can be
Maggie F-ing Gyllenhaal! (Whilst, conversely, it seems like anyone can be a
George "I Can't Direct" Clooney!)My inclination right off the bat was NO, just no. Something felt off.
We're really doing this, I thought after n-word drop #3? But I stuck with it and it isn't all bad. As a teen of the "mid90s," I have some idea of what life was like, but small town NJ is and always will be a world away from L.A. despite the decade or even the century. I still find myself struggling with that as a device here, because other than a lack of phones, this didn't feel like a story tied to any particular time. Oh, wait, never mind...
And — to be clear — my issue with the profanities and slurs and how they're used has nothing to do with morals or good taste. It's that it felt like a crutch if not like Jonah fully aping some other filmmaker(s). This worked much better when it embraced a
Slacker-esque, rambling approach than when it tried to be a west coast version of
Kids.
But, likes I says, it has its moments. If I can step back, and remove the "Actor turned Director" curve, then this grades a low 6. Hey, it's the (mid)90s!
Mid90s (stylized as mid90s) is a 2018 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Jonah Hill, in his feature directorial debut, inspired by Hill's own childhood in the mid-1990s. It stars Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges and Katherine Waterston, and follows a 13-year-old boy who begins spending time with a mostly older group of skateboarders while living in 1990s Los Angeles. It was released on September 9, 2018.
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