grade Movie Reviews

• Reviewed by marcag grade 5 / 10

  Punkys home videos.

  This had some cool footage but got boring quick. Never really goes anywhere. Kind of like watching someones home videos. Great for them but not interesting for anyone else. Still it was cool to see all the teen celebs from that time. They partied and had problems just like us regular kids. (I was 17 in 1990). Worth a watch if you're from that era but don't expect much. Soleil does seem like a nice person.

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• Reviewed by cpaulcanaday grade 3 / 10

  A trip down her memory lane

  Watched the documentary Kid 90 on Hulu last night. The premise - Soliel Moon Frye, aka Punky Brewster - explores her experience of moving from child to teenager to adult during the 1990's by diving into her vast collection of of surprisingly intimate and personal homemade videos and journal entries. It includes clips of many other teenage actors and celebrities at the time - her co-hort and community - and contemporary interviews with those who made it to adulthood. Tragically, a number did not. It promises to be really interesting, personal, vulnerable and insightful. Unfortunately, it ends up being only minimally any of those things. Personal? Yes, absolutely. But not particularly insightful. It manages to be vulnerable and superficial at the same time. Like a Hollywood map of scars. I got this scar from the time that this happened and that scar from the time that that happened (oh my god we were so effed up but it was so amazing), and coming up next on the right...It's too bad because she touches on so many things, so many deep veins that deserve exploring, so many things that I was willing to spend time exploring with her. But she never seems interested in exploring, just pointing things out. It's frustrating.Toward the end, thinking back on the friends who tragically took their lives, she talks about how much she sees now that she missed twenty years ago. What she doesn't say is that she missed so much because she couldn't see very far outside herself. By the end I was left with the impression that she still can't.Rather than exploring someone's journey with them, I instead just spent the last 90 minutes with someone while they waxed nostalgic over their old photo albums. And I still haven't gone grocery shopping.

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• Reviewed by voldiway grade 9 / 10

  Precedent setting

  There are many documentaries about child stars, but very few made by the star themselves. She could have spun it to make herself look like a hero, but instead, she presented unfiltered glimpses into her life in the 90s, complete with all of the raw emotions she was experiencing at the time. Nowadays, every teenager has video footage of their life that could later be edited into a documentary, but for a teenager to capture video footage like this in the 90s was extremely rare. Self-made documentaries of this type will likely become much more common in the future, especially now that there are vloggers recording every moment of their lives, but this may well be the only one of its kind from before the turn of the millennium.

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