reviewed by Brian "The Naked Gun" Felts & Benn "Where's the Humanity?" Farrell
In a nutshell, this movie is about how a group of pot smoking drug out teens that were surfers and
skaters, became a group of famous, drugged out older teens that put "professional" skateboarding on
the map.
If you like skateboarding then you will like this movie. Skateboarding is all you see for the first
hour of the movie, oh and Heath Ledger (The Order) doing his best Jim Morrison impersonation. The
first hour of the film shows the kids skating and shows how Ledger's character, Skip, helped these
three kids bring their talent to the public. You don't really learn about the three kids until they
all left Skip. The story then focuses on how the kid's lives went in different directions.
The story is written by Stacey Peralta so it is sort of autobiographical. His one mistake is that
we see way too much skating and not enough of the kids to make me care about what was happening to
them. From the beginning they were all pot smoking kids who skate, who cares? But he does give the
story focus in the last thirty minutes and ends it quite nicely concentrating it on the death of
their close friend.
Director Catherine Hardwicke made some interesting choices in filming the skateboarding scenes to make
it look like it was from a hand held camera, including the grain you get in those dated films. Yet
she allows the story to wander through out the entire film and I am guessing that it was the writing
of the last thirty minutes that made the ending at all bearable. This is her second film she directed
and she has a ways to go.
This is not an enjoyable movie and I say skip it, unless you like 70's fashion and music, or skateboarding.
In which case, I am sorry.
Brian - the Naked Gun This picture was fairly interesting, but far from exciting. I thought the movie went well out of its way to capture sequences of skateboarding and not enough of the actual story, even though the story is kind of lame. A bunch of skaters get some knew gripping wheels and they start doing some new tricks. Every skateboard maker wants to make each of them their poster boy and the money and fame screw up their priorities, if they ever had them. That's not a story that needs a lot of screentime, so the lengthy skateboarding sequences were obviously unessential filler. I thought Rebecca De Mornay (Hand that Rocks the Cradle) looked dreadful and I have a lot of respect of her allowing herself to be shown in such a horrific physical shape. Man, I hope that was mostly makeup. What I really appreciated about the picture was that it fairly depicted the decadence of the skateboarder lifestyle, especially during the 1970s. Not a single character was depicted as a good person, except for Stacy Peralta (Riding Giants), who happened to be the screenwriter of this true life inspired movie. Coincidence? Brian is right. We did see Heath Ledger doing anything we didn't already see Val Kilmer do playing Jim Morrison in "The Doors," bottle finger and all. What I mean by bottle finger is where a movie alcoholic is holding a bottle, drunk off his a**, pointing at the person he's talking to with his bottle hand. That way we get to see the bottle and the finger, thus, bottle-finger. Feel free to start using that term. On some level, I liked this picture. It was a true story pic and a period piece, and somewhere in its later material, it connected to me. However, it was a very small connection. I really have to disagree with Brian on one point. Yes, skateboarders for that decade are notorious drug users. It was a part of their decadence. And drugs were present in the movie. HOWEVER, we never see any teenagers DOING drugs in the movie except for one, and it was Sid, played by Michael Angarano, who says it was prescribed for him after being diagnosed with brain cancer. The picture is Rated PG13, thus we'll never see the minors actually doing drugs. We'll see them drinking and f**king, but for some reason, when kids are DOING drugs, it will warrant an R Rating from the MPAA. So, on that, the movie represents the kids not as drug users, even though those old enough to know 1970s skaters, that's simply not believable. Overall, I think Brian's write. If you like skateboarding or a fan of it, you'll probably like this movie. If you're not, you'll probably think it's lame. Benn - Where's the Humanity?
This movie is not very good and I can't understand why you would want to see it if you weren't a
skateboarder or a fan there of. The movie did get marginally better the last thirty minutes but
no where near enough to save it from itself.