Lords of Dogtown
Another film by Catherine Hardwicke really worth watching I think is Lords of Dogtown. It's about the start of the skateboarding movement as we know it today...how it sprung from a ghetto seaside town on the west coast of America and the three adolescents who were catapulted into crazy lives as skating heros. It's not a subject I know much about although I am totally in awe of skateboarders and have watched international competitions so I did enjoy that aspect of it I guess. What I really love about the film however is the way it utterly captures the feeling of that short period of life where you feel invincible, optimistic and totally free - purely through footage of teen boys on skateboards enthusiastically perfecting moves - before the pressures of life force them to make decisions that necessarily restrict their innocent exhuberance. The skating scenes are almost balletic in their choreography and breadth which provide a nice contrast to the way the majority of the film is shot; in a psuedo-documentary style. Although the allure and danger of vice is present in drugs and sex it is very much on the edge of the film and therefore refreshing in it's absence.
posted by raven @ 2:52 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
It's cool to hear about this film as I haven't seen it yet. You describe it so well.
I think it must be inspired by Stacy Peralta's Dogtown and Z Boys (2001), which was a documentary about the same story by one of the skater boys all grown-up.
A bunch of my friends used to skate - well they still do but they live in different places now so they don't skate in a group so much these days. I was always so in awe of them too, particularly the way they had to have no fear, even after all the falls and broken bones and back problems and all that. The things they could do were amazing... though I got lost in the terminology pretty quickly.
Lords of dogtown is not really inspired by the documentary but more about Stacy and his friends himself. Actually what's really really cool about is is that the three main boyz have cameo roles in the film....Stacy's is brilliant.
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