"Mid90s" Reaction
There's one Pixies song that I absolutely adore and I've always wanted to see it featured in a coming-of-age movie set in the 90's. I also spent a lot of my childhood playing Street Fighter II with my brother. Then came Jonah Hill's "Mid90s" which featured both of those things. Coming-of-age stories are my shit and I can't express how stoked I was to watch an amalgamation of all these things. This is gonna be a very biased and unpolished reaction to the movie. The film isn't that long but is very dense and I wasn't able to catch most of the dialogue so I think I need to revisit the film to formulate a fuller opinion of it. But here's what I can come up with:
The story follows a 13 year old boy played by Sunny Suljic (Killing of a Sacred Deer, and God of War 2018). He lives with a single mother (Katherine Waterston) and an abusive older brother (Lucas Hedges). His life sucks and so he befriends a group of local skater kids and things get pretty intense. One of the many great things this film does is make one moment hilarious and the next moment feel dramatic without causing a viewer to feel emotional whiplash, at least for me anyway. The sound design and editing feels primal at times and captures the matter-of-fact grungy aesthetic extremely well. Characters are flawed and often highly problematic but the film never judges any of them and I think there's something very beautiful about that.
Its soundtrack is excellent and matches the rhythm of the editing. There's one scene at a house party that I specifically was fawning over that I can watch over and over again. The score itself is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and it sounds exactly like what you'd expect it to sound like from a typical Reznor/Ross collaborative effort, you know, moody synths and piano stuff -It's an interesting contrast to the old school hip-hop, skater punk, and grunge but it personally didn't work for me and it just sounded super boring. That's a bummer because I love their work on David Fincher movies and Before the Flood.
I also have a bone to pick with a decision that the characters made towards the end of the film that barely made sense but just seemed to have been done to make a certain thing happen in the plot. It felt cheap and it felt like an illogical decision to be made in an otherwise intelligent movie. And then there was the ending (which I won't spoil) but I think it worked for the most part but I would've personally preferred it to have addressed some of the lingering tension between its main group of characters. Oh well.
Mid90s is an honest look at life as a kid in the 90s. It looks gorgeous and feels like a successor to the Linklater films of old. I very much look forward to what Jonah Hill will do after this.