Like everyone else I've often watched skateboarders do their stuff but it never occurred to me how they came to make the sort of moves they do. Now I know. It all began in the 1970s with the "volatile, obnoxious, hard-riding, hard-living Z-Boys from Dogtown". Least that's the way they tell it.
This feature length documentary is directed by Stacy Peralta, himself one of the original Z-Boys. The screenwriter and editor Craig Stecyk was the writer/photographer responsible for bringing the Z-Boys to international prominence way back then, so the making of the film is something of a family affair. Peralta and Stecyk gathered the old gang together to talk about how it all began: their childhoods in the rugged Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, their obsession with surfing which turned into an obsession with skateboarding and how that became a means of personal expression for all of them. It's always hard to warm to someone endlessly blowing his own trumpet and gee can these boys blow. They have egos the size of cities offset by shoulder chips as big as mountains. Most of them maintain the swaggering tough-guy stance they held as fifteen-year-olds, and seem to be still just as emotionally vulnerable. There's something pretty sad about a forty-five-year-old man boasting how he and his mates used to be kicked off the local buses for making "rat faces at old ladies." Like....wow.
But if the Z-Boys themselves are less than likeable, the film about them is very likeable. Peralta's style is as in your face, resourceful and driven as the antics of the kids he portrays. Venice Beach, with its abandoned and rotting fun park paraphernalia collapsing into the ocean waves, is an astonishing and moving image, while Stecyk's photographs, used to illustrate the articles he wrote in the '70s and abundantly reproduced here, are works of art in their own right. In the old film footage, the skateboarders still look great though most of what they pioneered is commonplace today. Each of them shows that confidence, fluidity, and grace in motion which marks great sportspeople, and makes watching them a spectator’s dream.
Beneath all the bravado, there is a good story here and Peralta tells it well. I'm pleased I met the Z-Boys (and one Z-Girl) but I wish I could have liked them a little more.
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