"Mid 90s", American actor Jonah Hill wrote and directed his debut, a small-cost youth film, documentary semi-autobiography. The biggest publicity point is the skateboarding culture involved in the content. The outstanding part is not only the emotion of the characters. Have the director's own excellent musical taste. This film mainly tells the story of a young boy Steve. He entered a new social environment because of his love of skateboarding. In the following months, he panicked, satisfied, enjoyed, and angered. All kinds of adolescent emotions have entered his life along with skateboarding culture.
Before I clicked it, I always thought that this movie would be a well-organized American youth comedy. The interesting point is similar to Wes Anderson's "Youth and Youth", and the worst off the mainstream is "Eighth Grade". However, the sense of surprise starts from the first shot of the film. Unlike previous films that focused on youth stories and teenage rebellious psychology, "Mid 90s" has a coarse-grained picture quality, a nearly square picture ratio, and a bias. The slow motion of the camera and the open ending reveal a special roughness and reality to the audience.
In this film, our protagonist, the little boy Steve’s way of appearing is very shocking-literally very shocking, because at the beginning of the film, the boy was brutally removed by his brother. The back room was pushed to the outside wall to draw in and out of the scene. There was a "bang", followed by a severe beating of the boy by the brother. This is only the second shot of the whole film. The slow motion and slightly voyeuristic picture is accompanied by such strong body language all at once, and the tone of the film is thus set.
Violence, injuries and skateboarding are all inevitable parts of this youthful memory of Steve. Boys like self-abuse, both externally and internally, but his external injuries are not only caused by his brother’s violent beatings and falling when skateboarding. When the entanglement and discomfort torture him, he uses the keyboard cord to strangle his throat. , Use a steel comb to madly rub his skin, the more painful he is, the calmer he is, and the more thoroughly he releases, the more complete he feels. Similarly, it was in this endless pursuit of release that he fell in love with skateboarding, and because of this, he met a group of people who were undoubtedly punks in the eyes of others. Later, he gained himself and himself step by step. With peer recognition, good or bad, he started to become more and more "cool".
"Mid 90s" is a film with obvious advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is the authenticity of the rhythm and the emotion, and the disadvantage is the limitation of the drama and the field of vision. And, what attracts me to this film is that director Jonah Hill did not add too much deliberateness to the film when restoring his teenage memories. Although the dramatic conflicts in the film are not absolutely natural and smooth, but In creating the atmosphere of the times, Hill did not stubbornly add the symbol of the times to the film like some directors. This is also good and bad. While preventing it from becoming a pile of images, the format of the film has also been greatly tightened accordingly. We can even say that the age in this film is actually not strong, and the 80-odd minutes are still private after all.
In addition, while talking about this movie, there are other youth movies in the United States in recent years that must be mentioned. In many film reviews, everyone always puts the "Mid 90s" and the "Miss Bird" that hit last year together, but to me, except for the two films being released by the same production company ( A24) Besides being integrated into the director's own youthful memory, there are not many other points that can be compared. Moreover, "Miss Bird" and Saoirse Ronan are not my favorite types.
If you have to use anything to compare, the film I think can be best described with "Mid 90s" is actually "American Sweetheart" shot by Andrea Arnold in 2016.
"American Sweetheart" and "Mid 90s", one is the fusion of moderate feminism and highway elements, the other is the collision of rough male perspective and street subculture, the former has a mature script and the latter is true and casual, but they both focus In the growth of rebellious teenagers, he used songs to pile up the era, and restored the image of the characters with a documentary-style shooting method.
In addition, I can also mention the "Eighth Grade" produced by A24 last year. In terms of the age of the protagonist, maybe "Eighth Grade" is the movie that can truly correspond to "Mid 90s", but of these two films, one is limited to the family and campus, and the other does not mention the actor's campus. Life and different perspectives make the two films have completely different focuses. And in my heart, the direct emotion and resonance in "Mid 90s" is not reflected in "Eighth Grade", "Eighth Grade" What is presented in "is more of the truth, but unfortunately, it is only the truth.
In the mid-90s, it belonged to the youth of the director born in 83, not mine. But then I remembered the opening paragraph of "Weekend Lover":
"In the past days, I experienced the things that every young man has experienced. At that time, I always felt that no one would really understand these things that belonged to our young people. Later I found out that I was wrong, because all people Have been young once."
Frankly speaking, this is a work that allows me to face my rebellious mentality more than any other film of the same type I have seen. After all, without the traces of the times, what the director tells the audience is actually an ordinary work. Growth story. We can simply understand "Mid 90s" as a history of the growth of a teenager, but when we follow the psychological changes of the characters all the way to the end of the film, perhaps we should also think about whether the teenager has really grown up ? What about us? Compared to my thirteen or fourteen-year-olds, are the things brought to us by the surrounding environment sensible and mature?
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