Dogtown and Z-Boys

A close-up look at the birth of skate board culture in Southern California, Dogtown and Z-Boys has attitude to burn, just like the sport it documents. Directed by Stacy Peralta, one of the legends of the sport, it captures the punk rock spirit of skate boarding, and perfectly places it into context within the boundaries of time (the 1970s) and location (a neighbourhood between Santa Monica and Venice, California). Even if you are not a fan you'll be fascinated by the story, which is told using a combination of narration, stills, great vintage 1970s skate boarding footage and new interviews with all the key players. Sean Penn provides the narration, and adds a flair all of his own. The opposite of stodgy, Penn speaks to the audience not at them, sounding like someone sitting at a bar telling the tale. At one point in mid-sentence he coughs, pauses for a moment and then continues. It's this kind of approach that gives this movie its edge.

I have seen this movie twice now on cable. The first time I saw it, it caught me by suprise. The skaters I was seeing were the guys we followed in the pages of Skateboarder magazine back in the late 70's. These were the guys we copied and tried to become while skating. I am glad that a film was finally made that gives an accurate account of how it all came to be. I am almost 40 years old now and I guess a pretty uptight kind of guy with all of life's problems, however; this film did a great job of taking me back. Back to the vacant pools, the backyard halfpipes and the road trips to Cherry Hill NJ. I suspect that in order to really understand this movie and appreciate it, you had to live it. Otherwise, it probably won't have the impact on you as it did me. But for those of you (and you know who you are), who did live it, you know exactly what I am talking about! In any event, I don't care who you are, if you get a chance to see this movie...do it! I give thanks to the Z-Boys of Dogtown for the memories of my youth and thanks to Stacy for making this movie! JOB WELL DONE!

I'm sure glad I finally took the time to rent and watch this documentary! It really brings back a lot of fond memories of skateboarding when I was a surfer kid back in the early seventies. Everything in this movie was familiar to me, the surfing, the skating, the names of the skaters, the equipment they were riding. As I watched all these kids ripping and doing the moves we strived so hard to emulate, I could feel the old stoke returning to my veins. Peralta (a great skater himself) really captures the electricity and energy of the time and the place. I'm 47 years old now, but after seeing this movie I'm so fired up I think I may have to get a board and get back out there (wearing a helmet and lots of pads, of course).

My skateboarding career ended in 1974 when my two-by-four skateboard with steel roller-skate wheels hit a rock and I tumbled, for days it seemed, down the sidewalk outside my parent's house in Boston. By the time the cast came off my arm, summer was gone.

But I have always admired the X-games types and surfers especially. I think I spent the first month after I moved to Southern California on the beaches and piers watching the surfers, bemoaning that fact that I had missed my calling. It's the sort of thing you should learn young, before the horrible senses of self-preservation and self-awareness burrow in. Or else at best, you'll be so worried about not getting hurt or laughed at, you'll wind up looking like a trained bear.

I always admired how a good surfer seems to not care about anything but that moment, that wave, that experience. At one with the forces of nature. A good surfer makes it look like there is nothing else but that wave right there, and the way you interact with it. There's a lot of Zen in it to me.

This documentary outlines how a few young folks took the surfing concepts and extended them to skateboarding. Ramps, downgrades, low sweeping curves while interacting with the cement waves beneath their feet. In their day and time, this was all new. radical. Prior to the Zephyr Skate team the idea apparently was to go as fast as you could in a straight line on a skateboard, hence my long "Evel Knievel at Caesers Palace" like tumble down the front walk.

This film is a look back through time, to an America before EVERYTHING was labeled, tagged, marketed, and jam-forced down our throats as "Extreme". (Seriously, what's so "extreme" about an "Extreme value meal" at Taco Bell? Other than the fact that it is an extreme hazard to your colon...)

Watch this film and watch the birth of 'extreme sports'. Before there was an X-games, before Boom-boom Huck-Jam, before Crusty Demons, before the ASA...there were these young street urchins who created 'extreme sports' without really trying. They were just doing it for the purity, the pure pleasure, of skateboarding in the sun with friends.

I hope they get a cut of the 'extreme' money out there. Goodness knows they don't get the credit they deserve. Maybe this film can correct that.

Excellent film with a great soundtrack, a portrait of a Southern California, indeed an America, that no longer exists.

I don't care for Sean Penn but he does a decent job narrating.

I never surfed or skateboarded but I still found this documentary fascinating. I accidentally stumbled on it while channel surfing (not sidewalk surfing) and watched it a second time later in the day. The Z-Boys made me think of the early days of rock and roll when young kids with no formal musical training basically "invented" rock and roll as they went along.. It seems the Z-Boys did the same with skateboarding.