The attention paid to Jonah Hill’s mid90s should have gone to another 2018 movie about teenagers skating. Written and directed by Crystal Moselle, Skate Kitchen follows a teenage girl stuck in growing up in Long Island, played by Rachelle Vinberg, who befriends a group of female skateboarders living in New York City. It’s very good — so good, in fact, that HBO is turning the movie into an “inspired by” six-episode series.
Betty is about “a diverse group of young women navigating their lives through the predominantly male oriented world of skateboarding,” according to Deadline, which adds that many of the movie’s stars will be back, including Dede Lovelace, Ajani Russell, Moonbear, Rachelle Vinberg, and Nina Moran, all of whom were non-professional actors at the time of Skate Kitchen. The series was created by Moselle and Love‘s Lesley Arfin.
Here’s more on Betty from the synopsis:
Opinionated and loyal, Janay (Lovelace) is strong willed and stubborn in ways that both help and hurt her. Honeybear (Moonbear) is a quiet storm. Her flagrant style is a ruse; an armor she wears to hide her emotional struggles. Kirt (Moran) is a lover (to the ladies), a fighter (to the rest of the world), and a little kid in the body of a woman. She’s the funniest person alive, but even if she knew it, she wouldn’t care. Meanwhile, Indigo (Russell) is a street-savvy hustler trapped in the body of a well-to-do art school drop-out. On the edge of the group is Camille (Vinberg), guarded, perceptive, intelligent and awkward. She wants to be down with the dudes in the skate park and has fought hard for the small space she’s carved out with them, but she needs to realize that cool points don’t actually add up to the sum of anything.
Betty premieres on HBO on May 1.
