Skate Kitchen Goes In Some Well-Realized Unexpected Directions

SPOILERS FOR SKATE KITCHEN FOLLOW

On the surface, Skate Kitchen's premise about a teenager struggling with their own personal family woes finding some kind of solace in a group of skateboarder friends sounds like a good number of other American indie movies, particularly Jonah Hill's 2018 directorial debut Mid90's. But on closer inspection even just on a surface level, there's a number of details here, namely the focus on a group of female skateboarders, that make Skate Kitchen a horse of a different color. While actually watching the movie, any potentially similar movies vanish from one's mind as Skate Kitchen manages to carve out its own identity and secure a level of quality (one that is higher than Mid90's in my book, for the record) that allow it to stand out on its own. 

Back In The Mid90s, A Solid Coming of Age Story Occurred Just As Bojack Horseman Was On A Very Famous TV Show

First Jordan Peele, then Bo Burnham, now Jonah Hill, there are so many comedians getting into the business of directing dramatic pieces of cinema these days! At this pace, I expect Horatio Sanz to have an acclaimed indie feature out by Summer 2020 at the latest. Hill's contribution to this trend is a coming-of-age story called Mid90s taking place in the middle of the (when else?) 1990's. Serving as Hill's first time directing or writing a movie (though he has received a Story By credit on a number of past movies), Mid90s isn't as good as the directorial debuts from the aforementioned likes of Peele or Burnham, but it is good enough to make me curious about where Hill goes as a filmmaker from here, he's certainly got a distinctive creative voice that has real potential.