borkoboardo

Who cannot remember his/her first honest trailer? What a blast it was! From that moment on it's a catching-up-game to watch them all.

Honest trailers to me is very comparable to South Park - which also had very good and most of all diverse ideas at the beginning but after they had to produce season after season it became very formulaic and "by the books". The same thing happened to honest trailers - one might argue it is because I'm now used to the concept. But still, when I watch older Honest Trailers the laughing comes instantly back.

There may be more than just one reason for this. One is definitely the choice of movies as the makers primarily choose current blockbusters or all-time-classic blockbusters which are very formulaic in their nature, leaving not much room for parody. Therefore most argumentations are based on the same flaws in those movies, and subsequently very similar.

Also Honest Trailers work mostly on bad films which are made with good intentions but fail to convince. But the fans demand Honest Trailers for basically every current blockbuster (good and bad) and so it also happens that movies are picked which are actually very good (Fight Club, Forrest Gump, Ang Lee's Hulk, etc) to create an artificial parody about points which aren't very just.

Still, the idea is highly original and here and there a good one pops up - not as frequent in quality as it used to but therefore in quantity. Almost every Screen Junkies box out a new one. Maybe that's also a reason for the decline in quality, but I don't give up hope! I'm still always happy when a new one comes out!

It's a difficult one - the history of snowboarding! A lot has happened over the past 30, actually 40 years, and it's an ambitious task to pack it all into a full feature film.

It becomes very clear very soon that the makers didn't have much information on their side. That's why they chose to rather focus on key people than the actual story. Unfortunately this is the moment when it becomes quite distorted - I assume the 1980's had more innovators than just Burton and Sims and I also believe that there have been more influential riders than Terry Kidwell, Shaun Palmer and Craig Kelly. In the first segment though there are some very interesting elements regarding things like halfpipe or early contests.

From the 1990's part on the storyline becomes pretty chaotic, switching focus very often without a visible connection. I'm missing a lot of key events and explanations about certain topics - instead the film assumes that the viewer already knows it. It also spends a lot of time just talking about how awesome snowboarding is but can't support the heavy statements with vital background information.

On top the production standards are pretty low which doesn't give it that big picture feeling and makes it hard to watch at some points.

If it had been called "The history of snowboarders" then it would have gotten 7 stars as it is more a collection of mini biographies than an actual history documentary. But with this premise it rather misses the point. Too bad!