Capturing Skateboarding and the Seventies with Heath Ledger and His Merry Men

Rating: Null/10 (9 June 2005)

Lords is a high energy film that drags the audience speeding along with it, tracing the early history of skateboarding in Venice, California.
We follow the fortunes of four roughly 15 to 17 year old boys and some of their girlfriends along with an alcoholic skateboard entrepreneur named Skip.
The Lords start their day by boarding off the roofs of the run-down rentals of their parents, in Venice. They hook a ride on a city transit bus until the driver spots them in the rear view and starts fish-tailing to shake them off.
Which turns out to be no problem. Our heroes drop off the bus jag, and segue into a line of stalled traffic, weaving in and out of the car line-up at high speed, by turns, dazzling and angering assorted drivers. Later, the most daring of the Four performs the crazy trick of boarding right thru a red light at a dangerous intersection without being hit.
Skip badgers and cajoles the kids constantly. He exploits them to promote the skateboards he is manufacturing at his Zephyr surfing gear and skateboard store. We are at the dawn of the Skateboard craze and Skip is bent on becoming a millionaire early. Only, he drinks quite a bit and shows signs of being a burnt-out 35 year old hippie.
That is the MO of one of the kid's Moms too, played by Rebecca De Mornay, who is so gone she uses expressions like "far out" and "man" and "can you dig it?" Even her kids treat her like a whacked out hippie. There is a heavy subtext of abused kids with parents who've failed to grow up.
At one point, De Mornay's current "old man" is moving out, and asks her reluctant son to help him, cautioning him to put a blanket over an enormous clear garbage bag of marijuana before carrying it to his car, and offering his surf board as a guilty pay-off for abandoning him, a scene both appalling and amusing to the audience.
Skip keeps running his hand-to-mouth manufacturing enterprise, employing other whacked hippies like himself, only working when they need enough jack to make a connection. Its hard to keep a production schedule when your 'groovy' friends refuse to show up for work. I've just realized, looking at the cast on IMDb, that the cool but whacked Skip is Australian Heartthrob Heath Ledger. This part is so good and Ledger so good in it, he deserves an Oscar. I didn't recognize him in his granny seventies blonde long hair. Its his best work on screen.
The Lords are perplexed and demoralized by the growing showbiz that is starting to overtake boarding. They gradually have given up on Skip, and begun to quarrel. But before falling completely apart, they define a new stunt that quickly makes them the crowned heads of sidewalk surfing.
Los Angeles Area pool-owners are ordered to drain their pools. The Lords decide to practice new stunts in empty pools, stealing into backyards the instant the owners go to work. The audience watches as the surfers perform outrageous tricks in the pools. An article appears in Skateboarding, another in People. Suddenly our boys are stars!
Only not all of them like it. An evil presence has intruded into their idyllic childhoods. One of the Lords steals a girl from a more waspish Lord, who looks like he is one of the Hansens singing group. There's a lot of long blond summer surfing hair on these guys. Only one of them has dark hair. One Lord refuses to accept any of the offers. He turns skinhead and starts hanging out with a gang. The Waspish one gets an endorsement deal and starts touring for a board company. Another of the Lords wants all the marbles, and signs with a Hollywood type who travels with an entourage of hangers-on and cheap bimbos in a longish limousine.
The hapless Skip has lost his guys and his business. We see him hand crafting a surfboard in the back of someone Else's surfing store. A clerk from the retail side comes in and asks if he'll have a customer's board ready by the next day. Skip says yeah, sure. When they leave, Skip relaxes, lights a cig, reaches for his hidden bottle, turns on the radio, acts out a lip-synched Maggie Mae that would put Rod Stewart out of business, then quietly returns to work. The whole 45 second turn is the best thing in the movie.
The wonderful ease of the Lords and the culture they created is spoiled by Success. The Lords stop seeing one another until the dark-haired kid develops a brain tumor and the others, finding success is not what its cracked up to be, gather at his father's dry pool for a rendezvous. An American Graffitti-style Epilogue tells us who the Lords become when they finally grow up.
When the lights go up I'm surprised to find two pairs of girls the only audience viewing the film with me. Voila!, why didn't I see it? This is a chick flick, even a skin movie for girls, since there is quite a bit of bared male surface in it. In the lobby, I notice two of the girls are dressed totally in black, wearing the wool knit hats cool black guys now affect year around, and sporting chains that run from the belt loops of black pants to enormous truckers wallets in their back pockets.
Lords reminds me a little of the stylish Fast and the Furious of a few years ago, but its ten times better. I'm still trying to figure out those two girls.