Lords of Dogtown
Lords of Dogtown is a fictional re-telling of Dogtown and Z-boys, Stacy Peralta's documentary about the Zephyr skateboard team. The movie was also written by Peralta and it focuses on him, Tony Alva and Jay Adams as they go from surf grommets to skate gods in the mid-70s.
And despite two basic problems--the characters aren't that interesting and 70s skateboarding looks lame--Lords of Dogtown manages to be pretty good.
The fundamental challenge with the skating in Lords of Dogtown is that kick-turns, berts and tail blocks are no longer radical. There's an almost laughable contest scene near the end of the movie that has Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta battling each other with various kick-turn slide manouevres. After seeing a 360 flip or an ollie 540--or doing them in THUG--it's hard to believe this was once cutting-edge skateboarding.
Director Catherine Hardwicke addresses this problem by using a ground-level skate cam that makes even the most ordinary move seem dizzying. Fact: this is exactly how I shot skateboard movies when I was 16 and my best tricks were kick-turns.
The characters, especially Jay Adams, fare slightly better. One my of criticisms of Dogtown and Z-boys was that it obfuscated important parts of Jay Adams's story. In particular, this incident recounted in G. Beato's Spin article Lord of Dogtown seems to have been scrubbed from Adams's past altogether:
In the most unfortunate incident to punctuate that era, Adams's good luck finally failed to coincide with his bad behavior. By 1982, he had developed a taste for tequila and ruining other people's nights. One evening, a trashed Adams and some punk friends found a pair of gay men walking down the street to yell at. When the men yelled back, Adams started kicking one while a friend punched the other. In a few moments, both pedestrians lay face down on the concrete. Others at the scene soon joined in, kicking the two prone men with their steel-toed boots. By the time they were finished, one of the men was dead. Two days after the incident, Adams was arrested at his apartment and charged with murder, though he insisted he had left the scene by the time the others started kicking the men. He was ultimately convicted of assault, for which he served four months in jail.
Lord of Dogtown continues the obfuscation (at the end it notes only the Adams served time on drug-related charges), which is a shame because Jay Adams is the only truly interesting character in the movie. Adams is alternately an earnest kid with family problems, a prankster, a thug, an opportunist, and a lost boy who loves his mom and just wants to pay the rent. Compared to Tony Alva (egomaniac) and Stacy Peralta (day-glo Republican with pretty hair), Adams has genuine depth.
Jay Adams is the prototype rebel skater, a point made explicitly in both Dogtown and Z-boys and Lords (Peralta seems almost in awe of his old friend). Maybe we'll hear his whole story sometime.
But, like I said, Lords of Dogtown manages to be pretty good. If you're really interested in skateboard culture, see Dogtown and Z-boys.
