Jonah Hills Love Letter To In-Between Los Angeles | HuffPost Entertainment

Watching Jonah Hills new film, Mid90s, which came out Friday, I couldnt shake how familiar the whole thing felt. There was something about the taco spot, the eggshell-colored alleyway behind the skate shop, the ginormous public school the kids sneak into, the fights and big hair and bland streets. Even the sup fools and fuck shits, the way the phrases dont so much roll off the actors tongues as rattle out of their throats on the creaking Spitfire Bighead wheels of their us and os and is even the vowels felt like home.

The movie, a coming-of-age animal-kingdom film about skateboarding in Los Angeles, according to Hill, is about a place as much as it is about the era alluded to in the title. Hill and his siblings were raised in Cheviot Hills, a ritzy neighborhood on Los Angeles Westside. Mid90s is certainly not set there. But it did feel a whole lot like the neighborhood next door, where I went to school when I was the same age as the films shy 13-year-old protagonist, Stevie.

Are you serious? Hill said when I told him that in the 90s I had attended Palms Middle School, a large and diverse LAUSD public school in a Los Angeles neighborhood of the same name.

We were sitting in A24s Manhattan office, a little over a week before the release of Mid90s. Hill had just returned from a cigarette outside and slipped on the requisite company hoodie, and now he was prepared to talk for exactly 20 minutes so said the PR guy about his passion project, which follows Stevie as he tries to earn the respect of four skateboarders he notices one day. But Hill was expansive, even inviting, over the course of our interview, particularly about the setting of Mid90s, an authentic slice of in-between Los Angeles.

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