An uncomfortable motif.

It was the Spring of 2017 and there I was at the family reunion talking to my cousin, and he asks me if I've heard anything about this skateboarding movie that Jonah Hill was going to make. I only knew what he knew, which was that Jonah Hill was planning to make a skateboarding movie -- and that it took place in the 1990s.

That got both of us interested; as a child of both the 80s and 90s, I looked forward to looking back. As for my cousin, he not only shared the time period experience but was part of the skateboarding scene back then as well.

My cousin asked me if I had any idea when the movie would come out; I told him that usually these things come out about a year, maybe a year-and-a-half after they're announced -- so I figured sometime in 2018.

Allow me to give you some background about me and my cousin. He's a few years younger than me, and because we lived no more than ten minutes away from each other back in the 1980s, we grew up together. We hung out, played with action figures, graduated to video games, watched the WWE back when it was the WWF, and cheered on the latest Schwarzenegger and Stallone flicks. (My first viewings of The Karate Kid, Big Trouble in Little China, and Robocop were with him.)

Then he moved to Mexico in the early 90s, and from then on I'd only see him whenever I was visiting over there or he was visiting over here. We'd stay at each other's places and catch up while taking in all the wonderful pop culture the glorious 90s had to offer us. As we got older, I saw him less and less because that's what happens; I'd only see him at family functions or weddings or funerals or all that other fun stuff.

So back to 2017 -- back to us talking about this Jonah Hill 1990s skateboarding movie. I can see how excited he was getting because of the subject matter and time period, and while I was only half interested, the half that I was interested in was a pretty big half. He knew this and I knew this, and so he said something like "It'd be cool to see it with you whenever it comes out" and I immediately jumped in with "So let's do it. When it comes out, I'll come down and see you and we'll make a day of it."

By this time, he and his family were now in San Diego, which from my Los Angeles County location is only a two hour drive. My cousin loved the idea and so I told him I'd hit him up the closer we got to the film's release date, which was to be sometime in late 2018.

Now cut to early 2018, when my sister asked me if I had anything I wanted to say to my cousin for a special going-away message the rest of the family was putting together for him. It turned out that my cousin was moving out of San Diego, California and moving into San Antonio, Texas.

Which meant that he would go from being a two hour drive away to a twenty hour drive away.

After picking up the nearest pillow and screaming into it, I then wrote my cousin a message wishing him and his family all my best with San Antonio -- and that I still planned on meeting up with him to see this goddamn movie called Mid90s.





A few months later -- November 2018, to be exact, I flew to San Antonio. I checked into my hotel room, and yeah, I got a hotel room because I didn't want to put my cousin out like that, plus he has kids and they're young and I fuckin' hate kids and I don't want to be jerking off in the guest room while watching YouPorn and all of a sudden here comes my cousin's six-year-old barging in catching me off guard just as I shoot and WHAP he gets nutted in the eye and great, now I'm a sex predator.

Fuck that shit, I like my privacy. I like to have a nice hotel room where I can comfortably walk around naked with the curtains open, just in case there's a voyeuristic woman or man in the next building who's looking for something to wish for.

Anyway, before unpacking I had DoorDash bring me a double cheeseburger and a Monterey Melt with an order of fries and an order of onion rings from Whataburger as a nightcap. The following day, I went to 2M Smokehouse BBQ where I had some incredible beef brisket and a side of "chicharoni macaroni" for breakfast, then I did the tourist thing by visiting The Alamo, got myself a hot towel shave and a haircut at a place where they served me Shiner Bock while I waited, and then I had dinner on a riverboat at Boudro's over on the Riverwalk, where I had a lovely conversation with the only other single person on board, a woman who appeared to be in her 70s and who was there to watch her grandkids perform in a band for some function at the Alamo.

Somewhere during this conversation, I mentioned to her that I always wanted to eat on a riverboat on the Riverwalk ever since I saw Steve McQueen do it in the 1972 film The Getaway, and that's where we both discovered we were both movie geeks. She was particularly fond of the works of Paul Schrader. I asked her if she had seen his latest film First Reformed.

She said she hadn't. Neither had I.

And that's when we locked eyes and I remembered earlier when she mentioned being divorced and I knew right then and there that we were only four glasses of wine between us from having a little May-December action in one of our hotel rooms later that night.

Having reached that ratio by the end of the meal, I waited for everybody else to exit the boat before hitting her with the big question: Would you like to join me for another drink or three? I hadn't finished my proposition when I saw her slowly reach into her purse and pull out a whistle, to which I immediately said "Good evening, ma'am!" and stepped off the boat and walked straight to the Coyote Ugly Saloon next door. I ended up having a couple beers while watching girls stand on the bar while doing PG-13 dance routines and giving both men and women their version of "body shots" which consisted of one of the Coyote Ugly girls tying the lucky man's hands behind his back while she put a shotglass of tequila into her mouth and tilt it so that the contents poured into the James Franco-in-Spring-Breakers lookalike's mouth -- again, that's if the customer is a man.

For the female customers, the body shot consisted of the Coyote Ugly Girl bringing the lucky lady onto the bar, laying her down face up on said bar, and grinding her body against hers and somewhere along the way, the lady gets her drink and we're all supposed to act like there isn't a double standard going on and this is of course called "experimenting" because it's OK for women to fuck around with other women all they want and it doesn't mean they're dykes but if I say something like "Hey, I have no problems sleeping with a transgender chick provided she doesn't still have a dick -- and if she does, OK fine, as long as it isn't bigger than mine" NOOO, I'm the biggest homo this side of San Antonio!

You see, old single grandma on the riverboat? I wasn't trying to sleep with you, you're not customized with the proper add-ons! So put away the rape whistle, honey, and let's get back to talking about that one movie where George C. Scott watches his daughter get banged in a porno!

The next day, I met up with my cousin at the AMC Rivercenter 11 and we spent a couple hours catching up, and then spent another ninety minutes watching the film we'd been talking about for the past couple years. So I guess I should talk a little about the film, huh?

Mid90s follows a young kid named Stevie somewhere in Southern California circa 1995 who has a typical lower middle class lifestyle, that is, if your lower middle class lifestyle included having a young single mother who has no problems discussing her love life in front of you, and having an older brother who regularly beats the ever-loving fuck out of you for sneaking into his room while he was out.

Me, I didn't have to deal with that kind of bullshit back then, I realized way too late in retrospect that I had it really fucking good back then family-wise -- my parents were straight arrows and the worst thing that ever happened between me and my sister was when we watched the Corey Haim and Corey Feldman movie Blown Away, which we thought would be good for a laugh but it turned out that the joke was on us when half of that movie consisted of watching fuckin' Lucas over here bang Nicole Eggert over and over again, and I don't know if my sister and I were trying to tough it out, figuring that watching The Lost Boy show Charles who really was In Charge would eventually give way to, you know, the fuckin' story, but no, it didn't.

Anyway, Stevie doesn't have to watch Nicole Eggert get passed back and forth by the Coreys much like they used to pass needles and STDs to each other. Instead he takes his beatings, and one gets the sense that perhaps he feels he deserves it, because on occasion Stevie will do the self-harm thing with such lovely household items as a hair brush, the cord of a Super Nintendo controller, and his own fists. This is his life, he has to deal with it, he's used to it, and maybe it's because he doesn't know any better, he just knows what he knows.

So one day, Stevie walks into the skate shop that had previously caught his eye and slowly ingratiates himself into the small tight-knit crew of skater boys that hang out there. It's four guys and half are assholes and half are all right, which sounds about right. I'm glad they weren't all assholes, because otherwise I'd have to say about skaters and this film what Quentin Tarantino said about surfers and the John Milius' film Big Wednesday -- that it's a better movie than those assholes deserve.

But no, the few times I hung out with my cousin when he was with his skate-bros, half of them were decent dudes, while the other half I wanted nothing more than to see a fucking truck splatter them all over the pavement, followed by listening to the sweet screams of their worthless mothers wailing to their former sons/current street pizzas.

I can joke about that because I almost got hit by a truck when I was six years old. I was being a little fuck and I ran out of the house and into the street and a semi-truck almost Gage'd my ass. My mother nearly had a heart attack at the sight of this, but she recovered quickly enough to regain the power to inflect major damage on my hindquarters with her immortal chancla. Some of you fuckin' hippies can call it child abuse if you want, but it was the only time my mother ever hit me and I feel I earned that beating, and you know what? I don't run blindly into streets anymore.

Maybe Stevie could stand for some chancla action, rather than his usual brotherly beatdowns, because maybe that would've taught him not to scream at his mother to "shut the fuck up!" I shit you not, he actually does that, in one scene he goes off on her, repeatedly screaming that shit at his mom over and over again. That really is some white people shit, right there. I've never heard of any Hispanic or Black kids yelling at their moms like that, probably because those that did -- if they ever did -- never got more than two words into their tirade before every trace of their existence was immediately wiped off the face of the Earth by their moms.

I love my mom and I think she's awesome, but I also respect the fact that inside that increasingly tiny old woman beats the heart of a lioness and I would never dream of screaming at her as if I were some spoiled ass white boy. You can point all the guns and knives in the world at me, but threaten me with telling my mom about something I did and I'll drop to my knees faster than a 14-year-old boy auditioning for the next Bryan Singer production.

Stevie soon scores a skateboard of his own and discovers a new way to escape from the realities of his life via rolling down streets and sidewalks on a board that has a dinosaur saying "Cowabunga" on it. Rather than having movie night in the living room with his mom, Stevie enjoys the simple pleasures of finally pulling off a trick move at the end of a night full of failed attempts. This is an awesome new thing for the little dude, who is soon given the nickname "Sunburn".

No longer alone or depending on the kindness of an abusive older sibling, Stevie has a second family to hang out with and now he also has access to cool things for little children like 40-ounce beers and cheap weed and older girls who are into you because you're too young to ditch them for someone hotter later on.

About that last part, this girl -- who looks Hispanic and I'm assuming is under 18 -- ends up chatting Stevie up and eventually takes him to her room where she ends up kissing up on him. First off, I bet you that chick grew up to become one of those teachers you hear about on the news, the ones who hook up with one of their students, and me and my fellow men react with the same bullshit half-joking comments about how we wished we had a teacher bang us when we were kids because it would instill in us a confidence well beyond our years, and that this confidence would probably have made us into goddamn winners in life.

Second, this scene between Sunburn and the creeper chola feels kinda weird because she looks older than her age and he looks younger than his age, and it's shot in a way that I didn't find exploitative, but it does feel like you're peeking into something that you shouldn't be peeking into, like you're hiding in the closet with Kyle MacLachlan's character from Blue Velvet watching this scene go down.

Also, I had a bit of a debate with my cousin after the film about that scene, about whether it was some kind of weird wish fulfillment trip from Jonah Hill, like, maybe when he was that age he fantasized about some older chick preying upon his tubby little body, the way I fantasized about Mrs. Kennelly in my seventh grade science class telling me to stay after school so we can discuss what an impotent piece of shit her husband is, I don't know. Or maybe that situation between Sunburn and the chick really happened, being that this is -- well, I'm assuming, anyway -- kinda autobiographical for Hill.

Whatever the case, the girl -- and the other girls in the film -- took me back to my junior high school days, or more specifically, my junior high school weekends. The way they were dressed and the way they wore their hair, wow, I was reminded of all the girls I was too chicken shit to talk to, as well as the ones that I managed to work up some balls to chat up but then fucked it up by being myself.

I would've been fine with the film being a time capsule dripping in Hey, Remember the 90s? if it were just that. But it's not. Aside from the opening five minutes in which we're inundated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles bedsheets, Street Fighter II t-shirts, and CDs by "Tha Alkaholiks", Mid90s creates nostalgia in more of a matter-of-fact manner -- much like watching an old VHS home movie from that time period where things don't look too much different except every once in a while you'll notice things about a person's clothes or the way somebody's living room looks like every lower middle class living room from back then.

What adds to this rather casual presentation is that the film is presented in the 4x3 -- or 1.33:1 -- aspect ratio, or in other words, it's a square box with black bars on the left and right sides of the screen, because you see, kids, in the good old days, we watched television from a square box that was front heavy as fuck and took at least two people to carry around if it was a big size. Mid90s was also shot in Super 16mm, giving a nice grainy image with the occasional scratch here and there, which combined with the 4x3 aspect ratio makes the film look like an independent film I would've rented from Blockbuster Video or Hollywood Video back in the 90s.

So in that context -- as an independent film from the 90s -- what would I have thought if I had rented this at a video store back then? Pretty much the same way I feel now, minus the nostalgia parts. It's an interesting character study of the kind of person who would devote his free time to increasing his chances of getting harassed by security guards, running from cops, and breaking bones. My only real complaint is that it feels too bare bones for this kind of film; I got the impression that there was probably a lot more footage shot for every scene but Hill and his editor knew it was best to get to the point of a scene and make said point as quick as possible. Now that definitely works with some scenes in the film, but there are other scenes that I felt definitely could've used some more breathing room. Nevertheless, Jonah Hill makes an impressive debut as a filmmaker here.

With the exception of Lucas Hedges who plays Stevie's dickhead brother Ian, and Katherine Waterston as Stevie's hot mom, the majority of the cast appear to be real life professional skaters rather than real life professional actors -- although the kid who plays Stevie, Sunny Suljic, is both a pro-skateboarder and an actor -- and these non-actors do pretty well just being themselves rather than shooting for the actorial stars -- which works for a film like this where just playing things natural enhances the verisimilitude.

I have to give props to Hill and his music supervisor for the eclectic mix of tunes that pop up throughout the film; you want to talk about taking me back, well, it seemed like every other song in this movie gave me serious I Remember Way Back When type of feels, stuff from Wu-Tang Clan, Pixies, Jeru The Damaja, Morrissey, and The Pharcyde among others.

After the film, my cousin and I walked around Downtown while discussing the movie; he gave me some good background on certain things in the movie that had flown over my head, on account of not being familiar with the skating scene back then. He talked about how the filmmakers did a great job with such details as the kind of clothing the characters wore; he said that one character wore stuff from a certain skate company that you'd only see people with money wear, which makes sense considering that this character did in fact come from money. My cousin loved the movie, by the way -- he ended up watching it twice.

I also ended up watching the film twice during its theatrical run, but not so much for the same reasons as my cousin. While I liked the film enough to watch it again, it was really more because my first viewing did not go as well as it should've. For one thing, I can hear whatever bullshit blockbuster playing next door booming its bass through the walls. But even worse, a couple of rows behind us sat a mother who brought along her kids who happily walked up and down the theater and stomped around on the row behind us and did that fucking annoying mumbling thing that these little snots do and the whole time nobody else -- not my cousin, not the people in front of us, not the lady in her Air Force blues -- seemed fazed or bothered by it. I was the only one and it was driving me mad. And when I brought it up with my cousin after the movie, he said he didn't notice. What the fuck? Am I the asshole? Am I losing my mind? Or is this how movie audiences in San Antonio get down? I don't fucking know, man!

But it's OK because I ended up seeing it again a few days later back home practically for free (thanks AMC Stubs A-List!) and this screening was especially peachy because I was the only one in the theater. Which is really the best of both worlds for me, to see a movie in an empty theater because that's where I am in life, that's the fuckin' misanthropic piece of shit I grew up to be. I wasn't always like this, but you know, fuckin' people, man. Maybe if I spent my youth watching less movie rentals at home alone and more time hanging out with asshole skaters more I'd have a different outlook by now. But I didn't, so I don't.

But I guess Jonah Hill did and that's how this movie came about. I think. I mean, I don't know how much of is based on his life, and I really don't care -- because it doesn't matter and because I don't give two shits about that creepy fuck.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that little detail -- I fucking can't stand Jonah Hill. He seems like he really is the characters he plays, or at least he is most convincing as an actor when he is playing fat scumbags, and I'm sure it's a matter of time before it comes out in the news that he Cosbys chicks or something. I see him in The Wolf of Wall Street and I don't see him playing a character, I feel I'm seeing the real him. I bet you this motherfucker has screamed at his mom to shut the fuck up too, and he's probably graduated to yelling that shit to whatever desperate wannabe starlet is currently blowing her way up his casting couch. It wouldn't be so bad were it not for him being in cast in movies that I want to see, because then he would be easily avoidable.

So think about the good laugh God is having at the fact that I dropped serious ducats to fly 1200 miles away from home just to see a movie written and directed by a probable piece of shit in an everyday multiplex occupied by rowdy roaming children who made sure I couldn't even really enjoy the movie. Well, laugh all you want, ma'am, because in the end I got to hang out with my cousin and watch a movie with him, just like we did in the good old days -- and that's what really matters.

OK, OK, I know what you're thinking after hearing my Jonah Hill rant. You're probably thinking, "Ah, you're just jealous because he's rich and famous and working with people like Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino and he's probably living an awesome life and you're stuck in your dead-end existence and with each birthday you're getting farther and further away from your dreams and let's be real, your window of opportunity passed about ten years ago and you're gonna probably die poor and miserable and full of regrets and bitterness, so all you can do now is talk shit about the goddamn winners in life while they continue to win and you remain stagnant in your pool of failure, you fucking pussy."

















ohmygod