Movie Review: Mid90s (2018)

Genre: Coming Of Age Drama  

Director: Jonah Hill  

Starring: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katherine Waterston  

Running Time: 85 minutes  

Synopsis: The setting is a non-descript Los Angeles neighbourhood in the mid-1990s. 13 year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) lives with his abusive older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges) and their young single mother (Katherine Waterston). At the local skateboarding shop, he meets a group of older teenagers: Ray hopes to be become a pro skateboarder; his best friend Fuckshit is more interested in partying; Fourth Grade says little and is attached to his digital video camera; while Ruben is closest to Stevie's age and the first to welcome him into the group. As he spends more time with his new friends, Stevie is exposed to the joys and hazards of early adulthood.

What Works Well: Jonah Hill's directorial debut is an edgy look back at a sun-drenched and unglamorous corner of Los Angeles, where kids without a functional home create their own within the burgeoning skateboard culture. Hill draws outstanding natural performances from a young cast, led by Sunny Suljic as a young teen receiving a crash course in peer pressure, independence, acceptance, group dynamics, challenging authority, and girls. Anguish and humour mix into moments of magic as unkempt foul-mouthed street kids are transformed into genuine people worth caring for, carrying their own version of hopes and dreams.

What Does Not Work As Well: The "leave them wanting more ethos" is marginally overplayed: Stevie and his friends are hitting their stride when the credits roll. 

Conclusion: Friends as alternative family.

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Movie Review: The Babysitters (2007)

A social drama, The Babysitters conjures up a devious but truncated feminist take on the business of sex between married men and babysitters.

High school student Shirley (Katherine Waterston) is facing normal pressures of preparing for college applications and entrance exams. She also babysits the children of Michael (John Leguizamo) and Gail (Cynthia Nixon). Their marriage appears tense, which encourages Shirley's crush on Michael. One evening Shirley and Michael share a sexual encounter, which he ends by throwing a handsome amount of money at her.

Realizing she will never be more than a sexual plaything for Michael, the entrepreneurial Shirley monetizes married men's lust for babysitters, and starts recruiting other high school girls for a prostitution ring. Her best friend Melissa (Lauren Birkel) emerges as her strongest business ally, but word soon spreads and rival girls establish competing businesses, creating a strong undercurrent of conflict and tension at school.

An independent production written and directed by David Ross, The Babysitters latches onto a complicated idea but is not quite sure what to do with it. The concept of high school girls profiting from the uncontrolled philandering of married men by organizing for-profit prostitution cartels is intriguing, not least because it is fraught with the pitfalls of a three-way collision between capitalism, feminism and the oldest profession unfolding in quaint suburbia.

Ross avoids all hints of titillation by almost completely stripping the film of any emotion, and this becomes a double-edged sword. Michael is the only character to display some semblance of conflict, but John Leguizamo fights an uphill battle against a script uninterested in warmth or depth. The other men are almost uniformly portrayed as doofus husbands and fathers quick to trade money for sex and unable to control their most base urges.

Meanwhile Shirley knows when she is being used and strikes back with pure economics, but her anger at men's transactional perception of babysitter sex can only carry the narrative so far. Likewise the other girls adopt a strictly business stance and march into whoredom in an almost trance-like state, middle class women-to-be seizing an opportunity to fund a college education (or buy more makeup and glitter).

Without any genuine human connections to latch onto, The Babysitters crumbles into a cold and calculating battle between competing girls to control the market, and unfortunately none of it registers as relatable drama. The plot devolves into a series of nasty and borderline exploitive actions featuring drugs, alcohol and mechanical sex as a weapon, a combination of connivance and naivete predictably leading to messy disappointments for all.

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The Movies Of Katherine Waterston

All movies starring Katherine Waterston and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Michael Clayton (2007)

The Babysitters (2007)

Night Moves (2013)

Inherent Vice (2014)

Sleeping With Other People (2015)

Steve Jobs (2015)

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Logan Lucky (2017)

Mid90s (2018)

Babylon (2022)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Alien: Covenant (2017)

A science fiction horror drama, Alien: Covenant continues the origins story chronologically preceding the first film. Covenant is a jumble of recycled content, lacking in thrills, scares and fresh ideas.

In a prologue, the synthetic David (Michael Fassbender) from the Prometheus story converses with his creator, business magnate Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce). David has strong self-awareness and surmises that his ability to out-survive humans makes him superior.

Eleven years after the Prometheus expedition, the starship Covenant is on a journey to start a colony on the distant planet Origae-6, with 2,000 colonists in stasis and more than one thousand embryos. With seven years of travel remaining, the Covenant is violently buffeted by a stellar burst and the captain is killed. The on-board synthetic Walter (also Michael Fassbender), a more advanced version of David, helps the surviving crew members, including the new Captain Oram (Billy Crudup), Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and Tennessee (Danny McBride) to repair the ship.

The crew receive a distress signal from a nearby but previously unknown and highly inhabitable planet. Oram diverts the mission to the promising new destination, and leads a landing team to explore the surface. Soon a couple of crew members are infected by dust-like spores and violently killed by aliens that emerge from their bodies. With the landing crew having trouble communicating with the orbiting Covenant, Oram, Daniels and the others are saved by the sudden appearance of David, who survived the Prometheus mission and has mastered the art of co-existing with the aliens.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Alien: Covenant often looks gorgeous but is otherwise a laborious and inferior retread of the same old plot elements. A spaceship isolated in deep space. A crew dealing with internal tensions. A distress signal from an unknown planet. A cautious exploration of the surface. A discovery of a crashed vessel. Cue the face huggers and body bursters. This is a franchise rehashing ideas introduced nearly 40 years ago, wrapped in a new skin but unable to hide the lack of substance.

The series has moved from genuinely frightening and difficult to destroy villains to lightweight philosophical dissertations about creation and the enduring value of humans. In the process the aliens have become an irritating sideshow in their own movies, trotted out at regular intervals to cause some havoc before being bundled back into their box.

The two roles for Michael Fassbender acknowledge the series' strongest point, and condemn how little it has to offer. Scott capitalizes on his main asset, and the actor delivers with two complex characters. David, representing a wrong turn in the programming of synthetics, harbours a serious God fetish and finds plenty of alone time to experiment with designing perfect creatures. Walter is an advancement and a retreat, more focused on serving his human creators. In both incarnations Fassbender dominates the screen with quiet authority.

The rest of the characters are watered down and unimpressive derivations from previous chapters, neither Billy Crudup as Oram nor Katherine Waterston as Daniels bringing much that is new. The one neat little twist is plenty of marital pairings among the crew members resulting in elevated panic as spouses are placed in peril.

Alien: Covenant may be a new ship with some new faces, but it covers the same old space.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.