Jonah Hill draws the cords of the heart in his directorial debut, Mid90 – Golden Gate Xpress

Jonah Hill draws the cords of the heart in his directorial debut, Mid90s

Before the hypebeast spends hours queuing for the last drop of Palace and before the logo of the Supreme Box is applied on everything from boxers to bricks, selling for over $ 2,000skateboarding was considered strange. It was neither fashionable nor fashionable, and it was highly improbable to make a fortune. Those who skated did it only for love.

Jonah Hill, well known for his performances in "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Moneyball", an Oscar nominee, describes a time when skating was still promising in his first film as director, "Mid90s".

As the title indicates, the film takes place in the mid – 90s and follows a young boy named Stevie (Sunny Suljic) who becomes friends with a group of Los Angeles skateboarders. Shot on 16mm film in 4: 3 format, the film looks less like a blockbuster in the making and a movie at home.

It was clear that the film crew had been working hard to make sure the setting was accurate over time. The scenes are filled with stickers, posters and graffiti that recall the era. Hill even remodeled the Santa Monica courthouse, which was banned from skating until 2014. Having Aaron Meza as an badociate producer for the film also contributed to achieving the authentic ambiance of the years. 90. Meza grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, filming skate videos for fun, and then worked as a videographer for Girl and Chocolate Skateboards, leading to a current position with Viceland in the skateboard show "Epicly Later'd".

Friends of Stevie – Ray (Na-Kel Smith), Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt), Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin) and Ruben (Gio Galicia) – were all played by skaters. Although some of them have no theater experience, they have been able to take advantage of their skating experience to give a real and natural performance on the screen, almost as if they were playing themselves.

"Mid90s" does exactly what it proposes to do. It tells the heartwarming story of a group of skaters who experience the highs and lows of teenage friendships. He checks all the boxes, sprinkled with fragments on diversity, racism and financial problems, supplemented by an optimistic and nostalgic soundtrack. Hill plays safety with his first outing as a director. My problem with this is that skateboarding is anything but safe. Not so long ago, skateboarding was banned from the community.

The 2020 Summer Olympics will be the first to include skateboarding. The sport has grown enormously over the past two decades and has come a long way since its modest, underground beginnings. While "Mid90s" shows the brotherly love and happiness that skateboarding can bring, I wish we could do more to show the inherent roughness of this sport. The only face of authority in the film was a non-threatening policeman played by the charming comedian Jerrod Carmichael.

That being said, the film creates a space to tell other skate stories. Hill manages to make a nice film for everyone, skaters and non-skaters. "Mid90s" helps propel skateboarding even further into the mainstream and will hopefully inspire other skateboarding movies.