mid90s

I’m sorry. I can only imagine how upset you are that I have not been reviewing more movies. Probably about as upset as a six-year-old tasked with picking up after a constipated dog. Less shit means less to complain about. Anyway, I have been on a top-secret assignment. I can’t tell you anything more than that I have been editing my novel about a man with a treasure map. I can say no more, except it’s a real map. But that’s all I can say. Also, when it comes out you should buy a copy for yourself and then copies for all your loved ones. Throw those copies away and buy some more.

Anyway, I’m back, but probably briefly since Nanowrimo starts this week and I’ll be writing a new novel about a boy who, despite his desires, fails to get into the high schools for magicians or mutant heroes or vampires that all his friends will go to. And those special schools have way better cafeterias. You are all doing Nano too, right? If not, shame on you. If so, link to me. I’m Leperboy. Message me daily with powerful words of encouragement about how I am a worthless piece of shit who has squandered every golden opportunity I was ever given, and I should get off my drunken ass and actually do something with my miserable, insignificant little life.

Speaking of miserable, insignificant little lives, I watched the skater movie mid90s written and directed by Jonah Hill. Seriously, a generic, one-word title that has numbers in it and isn’t capitalized. It’s like the pretentious fucker trifecta.

Just from that title, I already knew a shitload about this movie before I entered the theater. None of it good. First, lower case is what the pretentious kids at junior college use when they’re pretending to be modest but secretly think their poem about justice is a fucking masterpiece. Second, the movie’s gonna be way too fucking earnest and nostalgic. Third, it’s gonna be one person’s vision, and that person has too much clout for anyone to tell him the title sucks more ass than a horny loser’s Dyson vacuum.

If mid90s were trying to be entertainment it call itself Gleaming the Cube. It’s not, though. It’s trying to be modestly BIG and IMPORTANT and to make a STATEMENT.

Sometime in the grunge era, a prepubescent boy named Stevie (Sunny Suljic) lives in a broken home with an unbalanced older brother (Lucas Hedges) who beats the shit out of him on the regular, and a mom (Katherine Waterston) who had her kids too early and has a hard time taking care of them and herself.

A brief word about Waterston: she makes a fucking hot mom, and probably too hot and overqualified for a role which gives her jack shit to do, and in which she’s supposed to be too frazzled to look this good all the time. There’s something about her, though, she’s hot in a mom way. I think the kids have a name for women like that, something like MILGKWHOTSHBA (Mom I’d Like to Get to Know Well and Hang Out with and Then Someday Seer Her Boobs, A lot).

Stevie is lost, miserable and confused about his own identity until the day he sees some slightly older skate punks hanging out in front of a liquor store. They look like dirtbags. They talk like dirtbags. They mostly act like dirtbags. The tiny kid feels a kinship with them, though, and they take him under their wings where they teach him valuable lessons, like how to smoke, how to drink 40s, smoke weed, ditch the cops and finger vaginas. That’s about it for plot. It wanders around like an aimless kid, full of pointless small talk and regrettable actions that fail to add up to much, but maybe trying to say something about how your family isn’t what you’re born into but where you fit.

There are two clumsy scenes toward the end that reinforce this idea. In the first, the oldest, most focused and best skater of the bunch (Na-kel Smith) takes Stevie aside when he’s bummed and tells him that every member of their crew comes from fucked up families. In the other, a car crash ex machina brings the gang together. When the shit starts flying, they’re there for each other. Maybe, for the moment anyway.

As the writer and director, Hill is too big a pussy to assert this. That’s horseshit. A good director knows what he’s making and uses a subtle hand to take his clay ad shape it into exactly what he wants. Hill just has a bunch of raw clay and hopes we shape it for him. The trick is to make your point without getting in the way of good storytelling. Which mid90s is not.

Mid90s is supposed to feel lived-in, like a skater’s hoodie. It’s a little ragged and dirty, smells a little sweaty and like cheap pot. It wants to be a Richard Linklater movie, like maybe Slacker or Boyhood, full of little things that sneakily add up to more. The problem is, the tiny moments are just tiny, out of context. There is no point of view, nothing to frame why these moments matter by seeing what came before or what comes after. Will these kids be all right? Do their friendships matter?

The tiny moments are sloppy. Scenes where these teenaged boys just hang out and talk are nothing more than that, which I can do for free at Arvada’s skatepark. I can even get them to run away if I wear this cop stripper costume I found at the Goodwill. It looks totally real except the Velcro in the tear-away pants has lost its grip so they sometimes just fall off. Anyway, scenes where the boys talk about shit sound like first drafts, like there was an idea Hill wanted to get across but didn’t finish, and the result is stilted and weak. Also, the boys hang out in a skateshop that must be owned by Charlie Brown’s parents. Never seen, never involved. The movie sure as hell would have benefited from just the occasional presence of an adult who supports these kids, or at least can relate to them. I understand why Hill would choose to exclude them, but then why include the mom? And why pretend he’s trying to be real? There are adults in the real world, and how kids interact with them is a huge part of growing up.

The acting often matches the dialog for amateurism. Waterston, besides being fucking hot, is too good for the tiny and incomplete role she’s given. Sunny Suljic does little beyond smiling goofily or looking said, and I never thought he actually understood what the fuck he was supposed to be feeling. Na-kel Smith is good as the kid who wants to get the fuck out of the hood, but his morality and drive are a little overplayed in the end. The other boys just tend to mumble into their shoulders and be cowed. Very little of their soul is revealed.

The movie is also full of pedestrian skateboarding. It’s decent, but no better than what you see at a local courthouse on a Sunday. Perhaps that’s all part of the naturalism Hill going for, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel special or worth paying for. Maybe more like a guy in his 40s telling smoking a blunt ad then getting all teary-eyed that he and his friends were kind of good and that was pretty sweet.

Two Fingers for mid90s. Hill delivers exactly what the title promises, a falsely modest pile of horseshit, a lump of clay presented as art. But all that teary-eyed nostalgia ain’t worth reliving if you can’t learn from it.