When I reviewed Lords of Dogtown I said I expected this documentary about the Zephyr skateboard team to be much better but I can’t say that’s the case. It’s very cool and easy to watch, but more than anything I came out appreciating Catherine Hardwicke’s movie even more and wanting to watch that again – it’s incredible how faithfully they reproduced all this.

They should really include this doc on the DVD of the movie, it would be the ultimate extra feature. I hope maybe when it hits HD or Blu-Ray they’ll come around, ‘cos whenever I next watch the movie, I’ll likely want to watch this again too, and I don’t see myself paying for it separately. One thing I wanna say, that I always wanna say when a sports movie impresses me, is that this is a sports movie, and it really seems to be a sport that excites me. It could just be that these guys were genuinely doing something new (at one point an interviewee talks about how skateboarding clearly came from surfing, but what the Zephyr guys were doing came from elsewhere entirely), but the sight of someone flying around a swimming pool on a chunk of wood (especially as in this raw footage of the guys not wearing any kind of protection like pads or helmets) definitely stirs something in me – and there are weird moments in this movie, like the fact they started on clay wheels, and that thought of the day someone came in with the polyurethane ones, I don’t know, it’s exciting, it feels exciting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 8:50 pm in 3 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.