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In the summer of 1975, the very first skateboard was constructed in the Santa Monica and Venice Beach regions of California. The young members of the Zephyr Team, who were sponsored by a constantly stoned owner of a surfboard store, transformed the sport by doing gymnastic tricks and other insane things on skateboards which until then had been considered as only fancier scooters. They became famous and were rich after that, and one of them, Stacy Peralta made a 2001 documentary about them called, “Dogtown and Z-Boys”.
Peralta refers to the other members of the Z-Boys skateboarding team along with himself, who were the most famous in the world. All from the United States skateboard and continue to strive to reach the level of the so-called Z Boys. A huge contribution was made by the Z boys called freestyle; the reason is the same as with inline skating where there are no limits or boundaries.
Yes, it was a nice documentary. Why not be a skateboarding fan, In my case, it answers a question I have always been interested in, which goes as follows: Who had the first inspiration to go airborne, disengage from any means of contact with a surface, and do acrobatics in the air? Imagine, the pioneer was accomplishing this over the First vertical height of around ten meters to a surface of concrete. It’s not exactly something that minimizes risk out of boredom.
We now have “Lords of Dogtown,” a feature film that is based on the same material and was written by Peralta himself. Like most biographic films, this one is no different: it has no premise at all and serves to only highlight the weaknesses of the doc. It is a puzzle as to how and why Peralta was able to find so much archival footage of skateboarding from 1975, but he certainly gave the audience a good impression of those kids during those years. While Catherine Hardwicke, the director of “Lords of Dogtown,” seems to have a very good feel for the time and does what she is able to do with her players, we have seen the originals, and these actors surely are not it. Stunt acting in fiction films does not come anywhere near the spectacular feats shown in the documentary.
The children resided in what was one of the last remaining beachfront slums, situated further along the coast from the expensive Malibu beachfront. The beach was ruled by surfers, but once the waves calmed down, some of the surfers, or their younger brothers, skated on skateboards. The shop owner Skip Engblom came up with a key breakthrough: Polyurethane wheels, claiming ‘they grip.’ With that extra grip, the Z-boys began to try skating along the sides of the big open drainage canal that ran through the area. Then, a brilliant idea sparks: Due to a drought, the region’s swimming pools were already drained. The kids began ‘borrowing’ the pools when the owners weren’t around to skateboard the sides of the pool.
Emile Hirsch, Victor Rasuk, and John Robinson portray Jay Adams, Tony Alva, and Stacy Peralta, respectively. Adams and Alva get featured in several skateboarding magazines with Adams’s long blonde hair. They all look as if they’re cheap copies of the originals, as they surely are. Ledger plays Skip, their lucid and drugged-out mentor who ends up making surfboards in someone’s back room. But at least he was the catalyst. While stoned out of his mind, he sponsors the Zephyr Team, bestows priceless shirts, and then blazed out of his brain chooses to do so.
The documentary featured Z-Boys where there was a Z-Girl but instead, we only have Kathy who is played by Nikki Reed, Tony’s Sister. We also have Rebecca De Mornay playing Jay’s mother. She, like every mother from a movie set in Southern California, looks like she should be well-known. We don’t need to mention that the surf and skate parts are compelling – after “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” followed by the unsettling surfing documentary “Riding Giants,” we understand that the actual thing is vastly superior. Skip, who was in mourning to Z-Boys, starkly highlights: “They wanted it gone,” when referring to his dreadful feelings when the pier surprisingly burned down during that summer.
Skateboarding is a disciplined sport fused with agility, creativity, and courage, and we are fortunate enough to witness its emergence. One thing that strikes us as perplexing is, whether is there a time limit on how long you can be a skateboarder before it becomes too banal.
Stacy Peralta feels real nostalgia, as this period was the bedrock of his fame and wealth. However, he is now at a point where he needs to either (a) shift his focus to making movies on different topics or (b) confront the dark consequences of those brilliant days. Numerous drugs were spread across the region. While we see Skip here as a survivor, he is much more of a victim. Similarly to the previous movie, this one also fails to focus on the themes of injuries and accidents. In a sport where the athlete can plummet directly into concrete, have there even been deaths? Was there a person who got paralyzed? One of the more heartwarming moments in the movie is when the children take a friend in a wheelchair and decide to let him go into the shallow end of one of the emptied swimming pools, allowing him to ride the sides a little. However, the reason he is in the chair is actually because of cancer, not skating.
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