Headed out to rent Z-boys.

Rating: 7/10 (4 October 2005)

I rented LODT and watched it last night. I was very pleased with it considering the minuscule time it spent in theaters. The people portrayed in this film were many of my idols as a teen. I still own my original Alva board with Tracker trikes and SIMS pure juice wheels. This film brought back many pleasant personal memories of team t-shirts, skate contests and ugly clothes.
Many of you who have not yet seen this film may watch it and see it as "disjointed". That is a valid opinion but IMHO is probably a deliberate thing rather than a mistake. One of the things that Dog Town brought to skating was a certain wildness. Most of us in the "over 30" bracket today can look back on our own lives as teens and see that we were disjointed, unorganized, or maybe even a little frantic. Maybe my on recollection of the events, shadowed by my own experiences of the time, fill in some of the rougher spots and hide the more glaring faults but I still found enough of a contiguous plot to satisfy.
I do agree that the invention of the "Arial" (getting air off the top of the pool or ramp) should have been emphasized a bit more. Maybe it was skimmed over deliberately because it was not a Peralta thing but more a Alva/Adams thing and Stacy helped make the movie. I do know that once those wheels left the ramp, no skate contest was ever the same again. For the rest of the time I skated actively (into the early 80's) the quality of your air was THE definition of how good a skater you were.
So I have given this movie a 7. If you are or were a skater you will like it a bit better but even if you don't know what a skateboard is, you should be able to appreciate some of the elements of this movie. As for me personally, I am off to rent Z-boys to do some comparisons of my own.