"Mid90s"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

Stevie (Sunny Suljic)—a 13-year-old boy growing up in LA in the mid-90s—is a sweet kid. But he doesn’t have anyone to look up to. His dad is gone. His mom is, well, mom. And his older brother is just about the biggest tool in the shed.

So I guess it’s no surprise that Stevie looks elsewhere for role models. And, to his mom’s chagrin, what he finds is a bunch of foul-mouthed skateboarders. Ray (Na-kel) is the leader of the pack. He’s the best skateboarder—he’s really good—and he’s also the coolest. Then F_S_ (Olan Prenatt) is next in age, talent, and coolness level. He’s the clown of the group. Whereas Ray is serious about his skating—he wants to go pro—F_S_ just wants to skate and party and not take anything too seriously. He thinks trying too hard is “cheesy”.

Then there is Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), who is mostly-quiet, videos everything, and apparently got his name because he’s only as smart as a fourth grader. Finally, there’s Ruben (Gio Galicia), a somewhat younger kid with a stony, brash exterior, but maybe only because he has some serious stuff going on at home (which he rarely visits).

That’s the crew. You get some vague sense that they go to school some of the time, but, really, it’s like the never ending summer for these skateboarders. They skate and hangout and skate and party (booze, cigarettes, drugs, girls) and skate, skate, skate until the sun goes down.

All this skating in “Mid90s” is occasionally interrupted with the awkward, sometimes poignant, moments that constitute growing up. Stevie has his first beer. He hooks up with a girl for the first time. He fights with his brother, but then has a talk about how their parents let them down. He hears about how Ruben’s dad beats him, how Fourth Grade can barely afford socks, and about how the tragedies in Ray’s family dwarf anything he has ever experienced.

Most of these characters are likable in their own ways. Despite teenagers in general being, well, the worst, it’s hard not to fall in love (actually, better say like) with some of these kids.

However, this is a short movie—only 84 minutes. So there’s not a lot of time for character development—especially the gradual, trickling character development that’s required for a coming-of-age movie like this. Aside from maybe Stevie and Ray, we are only left with hints of depth—we see a rag-tag bunch of larks that promise, but don’t really reveal, roundness of character.

Most coming-of-age flicks are all about the characters. “Mid90s” is also all about the nostalgia—about Super Nintendo, skateboarding videos, baggy jeans, and Nike high tops. This movie is bathed in the past, which, I expect, will be most effective for those of us who actually grew up in the mid-1990s.

This movie also reminds you—or me, at least—of how annoying teenagers are. Yeah, awkward moments can be charming. And, yeah, yeah, I know being carefree and even irresponsible is just part of growing up. Nonetheless, as I sit here on this side of puberty, watching and hearing these kids who, definitely more than average teens, are reckless, troubled, aimless, and often just plain mean, I can’t help but sympathize with Stevie’s mom, who thinks this particular gang of misfits ought to be disbanded.

I know we are supposed to feel that, dammit, these are Stevie’s people and that’s how it goes and that’s so important. But when is too much too much? Given how these kids are portrayed in the movie, I don’t know that I could fault Stevie’s mom if she decided to move to the middle of nowhere, or send her son to boarding school, or something—anything!

And I think all of this speaks to an awkward (though not necessarily damning) tension in Jonah Hill’s debut filmmaking. It’s kind of like the tension between Ray and F_S_—Ray is serious about what he does; F_S_ thinks being serious about anything is cheesy. Jonah Hill doesn’t seem quite sure whether he wants to be serious—whether he wants to make some point or rather just have some fun making a movie.

Much of the movie feels like the latter—like he’s just showing us, and reminding us, how it was growing up in a certain time and place. But then there are more serious moments, too, and, to give voice to the F_S_ side of me, many of these moments teeter, though maybe don’t quite topple, into cheesiness.

So what would I say about Jonah Hill’s first attempt at writing/directing? Uneven. But I would also say it shows promise. Maybe, hopefully, this movie is as much part of a coming-of-age tale—with all the usual awkwardness and bad decision-making—for its filmmaker as it is for its characters.

"A Simple Favor"

By Matt Duncan
Coastal View News

The aptly named Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is an annoyingly on-top-of-it mom. Most parents feel accomplished if just everyone still has a pulse at the end of the day. But not Stephanie. This single mom (that’s right, she does it by herself) is an ever-vigilant watcher of her son, Miles (Joshua Satine), she volunteers at Miles’ school far more than is required or needed or even wanted, she cooks gourmet dinners, and she puts Mr. Clean to shame, all while maintaining a cheerful demeanor and snappy appearance.

Oh, also, by the way, she has a popular mom’s video blog as well. Yeah, she’s on top of it.

Yet Stephanie doesn’t have any mom friends (I wonder why). She wants them. Desperately. But she just can’t find them.

That is, until Miles and his classmate, Nicky (Ian Ho), absolutely insist on having a play date. Stephanie is game. But then walks in Nicky’s mom, Emily (Blake Lively). Emily is smart and sharply dressed, but also busy, short-tempered, crass, and just wants to make it clear that she’s not having any of it, no matter what “it” is. She eventually agrees to the play date, but only because she’s lazy with her son and doesn’t want to put the effort into telling him no. Plus, it dawns on her that Stephanie is basically a free babysitter.

Stephanie and Emily end up getting to know each other a bit. And they are quite an odd pair. Whereas Stephanie is wholesome, sweet, a bit naïve, and, most of all, way into the whole mom thing, Emily doesn’t care, not ever a little bit, about the whole mom thing—path of least resistance for her—nor does she care about politeness, niceties, social convention, early-afternoon sobriety, or just about anything else other than her high-powered job in the fashion industry. Emily is doing Emily, and that’s about all there is to it.

Yet the relationship between Stephanie and Emily works for both of them. Stephanie has a mom friend—a hip one at that—and Emily has, well, someone to pick her kid up from school when she’s running late (which is a lot). It’s a strange relationship, to be sure. But it’s oddly symbiotic.

Then one day Emily goes missing. Earlier in the day she called Stephanie to ask her to pick up Nicky, which, as ever, Stephanie was happy to do. But then it was dinner time, and then bath time, and then bed time—and still no Emily. It’s only after several days that Stephanie is even able to get in touch with Nicky’s dad/Emily’s husband, Sean (Henry Golding). But he doesn’t know where Emily is either. No one does.

So Stephanie does what any good friend would do: She takes to her blog. She gives updates, encourages people to keep a look out for signs of Emily, shares her latest theories on what’s happened, and so on. Out of love for her friend, or maybe just boredom—what else is she gonna do now that her bestie is gone?—Stephanie takes on the role of detective, piecing together any clues that may lead to Emily.

As Stephanie digs deeper and deeper, it starts to look like Emily is not who she seemed. But, then, Stephanie ends up not being who she seemed either. I guess nothing is as it seemed.

Indeed, “A Simple Favor” is one big plot knot—twist after twist after tangled twist. These plot twists don’t exactly defy expectations, at least not by the end, because there are so many of them that you sort of just stop expecting things.

Which isn’t necessarily a criticism. Plot twists are nothing new, and there’s a way in which they can pretty easily start to make a movie feel gimmicky, even formulaic. But the unique set-up of this movie—a couple of martini-loving moms meeting for playdates—together with charming performances from Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, keep this movie feeling fresh and fun.

Sure, there are some moments to groan about—like when a dorky dad foils an attempted murder at the very last instant, as if that ever happens, in a way that definitely never happens, and then goes all preachy on the potential perpetrator about how parents stick together … blah, blah, blah. All right, there’s some of that. But, still, you could be doing worse than to sit back, grab a martini, and unwind with this people-pleaser while the kids do, well, whatever it is they want to do, as long as it’s in the other room.