Lords of Dogtown review
Just the other day, I was listening to a radio talk show host mentioning some recent study that had determined that the part of the human brain that takes dangerous situations seriously doesn’t really gel until age twenty-five or so. This would explain a lot of the needless risks and perilous shenanigans that teenage boys get themselves hurt while engaging in. (It does not, however, explain the behavior of those older “Jackass” guys.) In the mid-1970s, a group of teenage boys in the poor town of Venice, CA ushered in a new era of freestyle skateboarding when they combined their repressed surfing abilities with their willingness to ride their skateboards in insane new ways. The urge to defy gravity has been inherent in mankind since the beginning; if the afore-mentioned study is true (and really, who knows?) then it is only logical that teenage boys such as these would be the ones to attempt “flying” by innovating the art of riding skateboards up the sides of drained in-ground pools. Based on a true story told the excellent documentary “Dogtown and Z-Boys” by Stacy Peralta, himself one of the very skate innovators who lived to tell the tale, “Lords of Dogtown” gives a very lucid if also uneven look at what living that life was like.
When the film opens, we are introduced to the surf culture hierarchy of Venice. One had to earn the right to surf beneath the dangerous pier, with it’s exhilarating waves and threatening jagged rocks. The older surfers weren’t about to let a group of fresh-faced teens onto their turf, hence the boys turned to “land surfing” with their skateboards. Thanks to the invention of urethane skateboard wheels that will grip, not to mention the water shortage crisis going on then, fate had smiled upon them. Patience and a little bit of stakeout prowess were all the boys needed to get access to the wealth of drained in-ground pools in the outlying neighborhoods. It wasn’t long before they became a revolutionary skate team, officially sponsored by the unruly Zephyr Surf Shop, and began blowing minds on the competitive circuit with their gravity defying moves. The 1970s skateboard craze was born, and the “Z-Boys” found themselves on top of the world. Magazine covers, big money endorsement deals, and even a cameo on “Charlie’s Angels” made up their skyrocket to fame. Of course like any skyrocket though, the thing eventually burst, and the world moved on to other fads. The sport of skateboarding would ebb and flow in its mainstream popularity for years to come, but the devoted diehards have never looked back since the Z-Boys first took their boards airborne.
So “Lords of Dogtown” is essentially an ensemble story of rising to fame in the 1970s. And having been directed by former production designer Catherine Hardwicke, you never forget that it is indeed the 1970s. For all its jaw-dropping skate stunts and wicked photography of the said stunts, the movie has a few faults, the biggest of which is that it tends to forsake its narrative drive in favor of wallowing in the gritty and gaudy world of thirty years ago. The fact that the film is based on a true story cuts it some slack in that department – the real lives of people rarely play out like conventional movie structures – but on the other hand, the conventions exist because they work, and if one wants the freeform blow-by-blow version of how this went down, there’s always the superior “Dogtown and Z-Boys” (which Peralta supposedly made in order to insure the integrity of the story told in this long-in-the-works feature). True story or not, Peralta’s screenplay could’ve settled on whether it’s an ensemble or a main character tale. The film frenetically shifts from being innocent young Peralta’s story to being about a few of the other more unruly boys, to being about the whole team, and back again. It’s all a bit disjointed and a little unsettling, but the film is not spoiled in the long run.
The cast of young boys (the headliners being John Robinson as Peralta, Emile Hirsch as Jay Adams, and Victor Rasuk as Tony Alva) is deserving of praise, not only for their convincing skateboard abilities, but also for selling the reality of youth under the magnifying glass. Although Heath Ledger is drawing praise for his portrayal of perennial California surf bum and Zephyr Shop owner Skip, I quickly became annoyed with his scenery chewing. Rebecca De Mornay also chews a bit of scenery from time to time as the damaged goods mother of one of the boys, but she’s never around very long to really make an impression. Effective casting or not, Hardwicke forces the era itself to be the real star of the film, a major element being a soundtrack of unfortunately tired classic rock hits. (Looking at the CD soundtrack, it occurred to me that I have almost all these songs on other CD soundtracks.) One tune that does work is the recurring use of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”, which the filmmakers were obviously unable to get the rights to, thus resulting in a cover version playing throughout the film.
Whether you are into skateboarding or not, (and I’m definitely not,) “Lord of Dogtown” will probably be enjoyable on some level. It’s not the slam dunk of “Dogtown and Z-Boys” (the existence of which makes this version all the less necessary), but it does manage to pull it’s meandering self together by the very end. All in all, it makes a dramatic history lesson for skaters, themselves a young lot that may ordinarily be more interested in attempting crazy new moves than taking a look back at their own origins.
- Jim Tudor
