Lords of Dogtown
dir. Hardwicke
Opens Fri June 3
Various Theaters
As most everybody knows by now, the streets of Dogtown–a lousy, rundown area between Santa Monica and Venice Beach–gave birth to modern skateboarding. More accurately, it was Dogtown’s teenaged residents, the Z-Boys, who used urethane wheels and empty swimming pools to reinvent a sport.
The reason most everybody already knows about Dogtown and its Z-Boys is because there was already a pretty decent movie made about them–Stacy Peralta’s 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Compiling old footage and new interviews from the most important of the Z-Boys–including Tony Alva, Jay Adams, and Peralta himself–Z-Boys was a fast-paced, sure-footed introduction to the origins of modern skateboarding.
Lords of Dogtown, the mass-marketed dramatization of the Z-Boys’ story, isn’t a bad film so much as an unnecessary one. Catherine Hardwicke’s direction is smart and fast, and nearly the entire cast is believable and likable–there’s the earnest John Robinson (playing Peralta), the heartfelt Emile Hirsch as Jay Adams, and an appropriately egotistical Victor Rasuk as Tony Alva. (Better still is a surprisingly good Heath Ledger, playing the local skateshop owner.) Even the Peralta-penned script is fairly solid, if a bit too pro-Peralta to be wholly plausible.
No, it’s the weird tone of Dogtown that seems so off: Sure, the human elements of the Z-Boys’ story get room to breathe, but there’s no new viewpoint added to the Z-Boys mythos; Dogtown just feels like a retread of the documentary, and one written as if it were a tween-targeted pilot for the WB.
Perhaps Dogtown leaves such a sour aftertaste because, at its core, the Z-Boys’ story is one of astonishing kids and an astonishing sport being unraveled by outside interests. For all its efforts to tell the underground story of the Z-Boys, Dogtown can’t shake the fact that it’s produced by the megalithic Sony Pictures and that it kowtows to the very commercial interests that tore the Z-Boys apart.
