Minding the Gap

I registered on the site to write this because I was hungover on a Sunday and looking for skateboarding videos/docs online. I used to skate and cannot now due to a back injury.

I expected something featuring tricks and skate videos, however I received an extremely emotional reaction to a brilliant documentary about real people living through very real issues I have had experienced. The film was made brilliantly and I have highly recommended this to my friends. People who skate and those who don't. A very well done piece. I grew up in the Midwest and knew the struggle of "when is the sidewalk good for skating" with the cabin fever of just wanting to pop an ollie outside.

Brilliant. Highly recommended, especially for anyone that broke out on a skateboard (bike, roller blades, etc) just to get outside when young. This doc is terrificly an underdog.

From the breathtaking, fluid camera work to the increasingly brutal, honest emotionality, this documentary is a brilliant piece of work that needs to be seen by all, especially young men for whom this should be mandatory viewing.

Honestly I didn't find this sort of movie meaning skaters to be my type of documentary. But I love a great thought provoking documentary. It's brilliant and beautiful in so many ways. I totally recommend watching.

I initially struggled with my reaction to Minding The Gap. On one hand I had the impression that I didn't enjoy this film because I didn't have the reaction that many of it's fans seemed to have, which was my initial reaction to another referenced documentary from one reviewer, Hoop Dreams. Those fans talk about how they found the film 'devastating', or 'emotionally blown-away', or 'heartbreaking'. To my mind those emotions can only come from a place of sympathy or empathy. However, for me while I did have those feelings toward some of the characters in Minding The Gap, I did not feel it toward all of the characters, nor necessarily to the film as a whole. I did still find Minding The Gap wonderfully interesting, and therefor entertaining too. I am still a fan of this film and do recommend checking it out, but want to say that it's OK not to love or feel sympathy, or badly for the plight of all of it's characters.

Two really good skateboarding movies came out recently. The first one I got to see, Crystal Moselle's "Skate Kitchen", functioned as a fun semi-documentary that celebrated the friendship forged between a crew of NYC girls making their own space in a predominately male sport. The second one, Bing Liu's "Minding the Gap" took a very different approach to the subject, focusing much deeper on the pain that drove a group of three Midwestern skateboarders together, and how the same wounds would continue to dictate their life both in and outside of skateboarding. Unlike Skate Kitchen, this documentary is not an easy watch. It's by no means a boring watch, as Liu constructs a very cinematic experience both visually and emotionally, but some of the life experiences that the director focuses on can be truly devastating to anyone who has ever experienced anything similar. The characters in this film are real, and you want to see each of them succeed despite the odds stacked against them. I don't want to spoil the story too much, but I will say that there's something in this movie for everyone. It's much less a skateboarding movie than it is a movie about parenthood gone wrong and finding your way in your 20's, which I'm sure a lot of people can relate to. I hope everyone gets to see this film, and I hope everyone has a box of tissues close by.