Dogtown and Z-Boys
There was however this one little thing, a mote that irritated me through the last half of the movie. It was, simply, the presence of Stacy Peralta. Somewhere about midway through the film, Henry Rollins is being interviewed and he starts talking about "what you guys were doing." Then Ian MacKaye also refers to "you," and even if you didn't know about the scene and the movie's history--original Z-boy Stacy Peralta wrote and directed the film--it's clear at this point that one of the Zephyr skate team is doing the interviewing. And then later, in the controversial interview with Jay Adams, you can hear Peralta asking a question.
Now, I've always liked Stacy Peralta and I admired his skating in the Bones Brigade videos. But his voice compromises the integrity of the movie. In particular, the schlocky part that deals with Jay Adams seems disingenuous. This problem is magnified by Peralta's mawkish directing in this segment and the lack of details about Adams's actual problems. I got the feeling that Peralta was avoiding some of those details (read G. Beato's article The Lords of Dogtown for a better sense of Adams's sins) since they would make Adams less of a tragic figure. And that seems to be the character Peralta wants him play--whether it's true or not.
By the end of the movie, I was convinced of the cultural importance of the Dogtown skate scene. But I also felt, especially when Stacy Peralta was talking--because by this point you have to imagine him interviewing himself--that I was witnessing a kind of auto-hagiography. (So, digging around, I found that I'm not the only one who found this aspect of the film troubling--e.g. this Salon review, and this NY Times review).
Two other thoughts about the movie: 1) a lot of attention is given to the skaters, and while the contributions of Craig Stecyk and Glen E Friedman are acknowledged, I don't think they were given their due. Those two (along with Peralta in later years) are as much responsible for the cultural phenomenon of skateboarding as the skaters themselves. 2) Sure, vert skating was revolutionary, but my friends and I (and I suspect this is true of most kids who started skating in the mid-80s) didn't have access to pools or halfpipes. We were attracted to street style, and watching Natas ollie a fire hydrant (or ollie onto a picnic table, and then to a frontside railslide on a dumpster, and land it) blew our minds more than any vert skating sequence. Dogtown and Z-boys records the lift-off of modern skateboarding, but not its whole trajectory.
All that aside, Dogtown and Z-Boys is worth seeing. The film sequences especially show the grace and power and raw simplicity of the Zephyr team's surf-inspired skating.
