Lords of Dogtown

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Lords of Dogtown is a coming of age story set in the 1970's about a trio of gifted skateboarders (Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva, and Jay Adams) rising up from the rough streets of Venice, California, to revolutionize the sport. In re-imagining Peralta's award-winning documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys to cater towards a teenage audience the PG-13 rated film loses some of its credibility, but provides a decent overview of these young men's influence on skating.

The movie begins with our leads sneaking out early morning to go catch waves. Before skating caught on surfing was the activity of choice for the daring especially in California with our characters living right by the beach in Dogtown (Venice). Skating grew in part because it was something that could be done anywhere regardless of the weather as cement is endless. As the film unwinds we see how these boys go from nobodies to stars with their new skating tricks and outlaw demeanor, in turn bringing skating to the forefront. Along with that comes excess, hardship, success, and loss testing the boy's friendships.

Stacy Peralta (John Robinson) is the good guy. Robinson in portraying Peralta looks like he belongs in Hanson, with his long hair and pale features. He does not seem to fit the idea of a skateboarding innovator. He even has a job and is responsible. Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk ) is the one most interested in seeking fame and fortune as the center of attention. Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch) is the misguided youth. He loves to skate and lives in a broken home with his single parent mom. He is all energy but does not know how to channel that unless in delinquent behavior.

The acting is fine by the trio. It doesn't blow you away, but they work with what they were given as things are glossed over in the script for time management it appears. Then there is Heath Ledger as Skip, the surf/skate shop owner, the active parental figure the boys seem to be missing in their lives. Unfortunately even though the man has vision promoting skateboarding by making boards and sponsoring the Zephyrs (Z-Boys) he is also an alcoholic and unstable. Ledger plays him as a hippie/surfer come businessman with a slurred speech. This makes it difficult to watch him in scenes or at the very least annoying to hear him speak. For some reason it felt like he was doing a bad Val Kilmer impersonation, who I like.

Rebecca De Mornay is unrecognizable as Philaine, Jay's mother. She no longer relies on her looks and very much fits the part of the downtrodden single parent, who you know, wants to get it together but never will. Even in her small role she has stage presence.

The visuals of the film are gritty which

is what the filmmakers want to portray in not only the actions of the time but the outlaw persona of skating. Everything looks slightly frayed and coarse. The skating scenes provided a natural feel capturing the grace and speed intrinsic in movement. To go with that what I really noticed was the sound, not so much the soundtrack, but rather the sound of the wheels grinding the cement as they turned. This helped put me in the space.

There's always the risk of trivializing real events when you make a movie based on them. Lords of Dogtown cannot avoid this either as it has a finite running time to explain how three young men popularized and transformed a sport on the outskirts of society by injecting it with a rebel spirit that people could get behind. How do you capture that in a few hours? With montages and photo shoots in this case. Then you wonder how true to life the characters are even with Stacy Peralta as the screenwriter of the movie. Are they only caricatures? Peralta comes off as the moral compass, Alva the attention starved, and Adams the severely misguided. To its credit it attempts to show their home lives so we can understand where the characters are coming from. This also helps as we see them rise and fall. Unfortunately the film has a lot of preening for the camera going on with tongues wagging and facial gesticulations that come off corny. (You may have seen these in the preview.) This stuck me as very Hollywood or fake.

Lords of Dogtown attempts to show how three kids from the wrong side of the track made skating a sport on the periphery, popular. It's as if their harsh upbringing meshed perfectly with the skateboarding aesthetic in their destiny to show the world the beauty inherent in something so raw and freeing. The movie does a slightly better than average job of presenting this showing occasional back-story, but in the end it resorts to glossing things over as if it ran out of time.

Movie Grade: B-