Style was everything

My first impression of Dogtown and Z-Boys wasn't very good, and I think that may have tainted the rest of the movie for me. I started out watching it on the big screen, but the movie doesn't really sit still. It has lots of fast camera moves and cuts - and wasn't any fun to watch on a big screen. After I switched over to the small screen it was better, but I think I was already on the path to not liking it.

Although, I don't think I would have liked it without the bad first impression either.

This is a documentary about a competition skateboarding team from the 70's who helped revolutionize skateboarding. That's great, it's a fine subject. I just think they made two key mistakes. The first is the choppy edits that made me switch to a smaller screen. The subject of this movie is a 30 year old counter culture movement. This means their source material was mostly grainy home movies, still pictures, and interviews with the people now - when they're firmly in middle age. There's lots of documentaries that have less to work with, but they don't typically try to be edgy. This movie tried to be edgy. Instead of just showing a still picture, it would quickly pan around that picture and cut to other still pictures. Instead of showing some grainy video, they'd cut in other bits of video, or quickly cut back to an interview or other stills. It's as if the movie wanted to embody the edgy feeling that the skate crew had back in the day.

But when you're dealing with limited source material it's already hard enough to convey visuals to the viewer, when cutting around like that it just totally hoses it.

This is closely related to the other key problem - the attitude of the movie. While watching, I mostly felt like I was a fly on the wall of a reunion of this crew, listening to them tell stories and relive the glory days. This could be good too, but they weren't really telling stories as much as they were saying "wow, that was cool - those were the days." What the movie lacked was some perspective, some more insight into why this was an interesting group. Sure, we have a casual understanding of this. We know that skateboarding used to look very different than it does today and these kids were a big part in changing that. But I didn't feel like the movie took a step back and let that sink it. It was too busy being edgy and letting these guys relive the glory days.

I think one of the key faults is the filmmaker was one of the guys. For him he didn't need perspective, he remembers how cool it was. I think a more neutral filmmaker would have brought in more outside perspective, or at least would have focused on them more.

That's not to say that this format can't work. I just think if it's going to be about the guys then it has to make the guys into more interesting characters then they were here. This movie didn't appear to be about the skating, or about the guys, it seemed to be about the time. And it's hard to get strangers to care about the glory days as a time.

Side note: The cutting between different sources did work amazingly well in one instance. They were talking about how their skating style was tying to mimic top surfers and they did fade cuts between clips of guys surfing and clips of kids skateboarding. That was beautiful.

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