Movie Breakdown: Kid 90 (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
I guess Soleil Moon Frye directed a documentary about being a kid actor in the ’90s. Aside from harboring a sizable crush on Moon Frye as a kid, I couldn’t tell you a single thing she’s done since Punky Brewster. I’m curious, if not excited.
Post-Screening Ramble:
It isn’t that the life of Soleil Moon Frye isn’t interesting. As a kid she became very famous for playing a precocious kid, Punky Brewster, before attempting to translate her youthful celebrity into a full career. It didn’t happen, but she still maintained close ties with some of the big kid actors of the day – Brian Austin Green, Stephen Dorff, Mark Paul-Gosseler, the guy from House of Pain. And she videotaped all of it. The young actor, seemingly, filmed almost every interaction she ever had from desert mushroom trip to Charlie Sheen’s awkward voice messages. In Kid 90, her directorial debut, Moon Frye attempts to go back through her recordings (and diaries and photos and drawings) to make sense of why she lived the life she lived. Which is a difficult task when your primary source documents are the flower-and-heart love notes of a teenager or the pseudo-intellectual philosophies of a hammered college freshman. Moon Frye enlists the aid of several old chums in accomplishing the task, but they provide only superficial agreement – yes, this stuff happened – while squinting at the camera, trying to figure out what exactly they’re supposed to say. Seeing such an intimate view of so many famous people’s lives (including Moon Frye’s) is interesting, but you can only watch home videos for so long before they lose their luster. It’s the task of the director, Moon Frye, to draw meaning and aside from boiler plate psychoanalysis, there isn’t much to speak of. Instead this is an attempt at reckoning with one’s past in a public setting with little to no reckoning.
One Last Thought:
Why is there so much Soleil Moon Frye right now? Punky Brewster got a reboot, this documentary got the green light – what is going on?
