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I remember when skateboarding had it's rebirth in the 70s. I begged my parents for money to by a second-hand skateboard from a friend. It was a piece of junk, complete with clay wheels and everything. I also remember reading Skateboarder Magazine and being both completely impressed and totally terrified of the Dogtown crew. Skating never became a way of life for me, but in some ways it has always been a part of my life, whether it is using a board for transportation or just having a bunch of friends that skate.
This film is a brilliant documentary of the real birth of modern day skating. Watching this crew turn skating from the flat boring hobby it was into the vertical lifestyle it has become had me sitting slack-jawed for 90 minutes.
It's amazing that enough footage from this period still exists to have created this film, and thank god for that. The footage is brilliant. It gave me the feeling of watching an old Buster Keaton film: I've seen some of the tricks Keaton did repeated countless times in other films since then, but when you go back and see the first person to perform that trick it's amazing that, not only were they the first person to try it successfully, but that they lived through it and made it seem effortless. That's the feeling this film gave me. Yeah, I've seen people skate pools before, but to watch the FIRST people skating pools and inventing the tricks that eventually became the basics of modern skating is like watching the facade of the house fall on Keaton, leaving him standing safely in the frame of a window. It's absolutely brilliant to watch something that, up until that point, had never been tried before, but since, has been tried by almost everyone.
This film is beautiful to watch and incredible to listen to. The soundtrack is one of the best I've ever heard in a film. This is a film that will appeal to people whether they like skating or not. I've talked to a couple of friends of mine who made their girlfriends sit through this film after heavy protest, and they all said that their girlfriends were mesmerized by the end of the film and loved it as much as they did.
As for the previous comments on this board that complain about the film being too self congratulatory, I think that's an unfair disparagement. I liked seeing these guys get excited about their past. They created something that influenced their sport and changed it forever. They have the right to pat themselves on the back. They were stars for doing what they loved to do. Most of these guys/girls never achieved the staggering success Tony Hawk enjoys today, but that kind of success wasn't available to skaters then. Sure, they had some success, but more importantly, they have been able to live a life doing what they love to do, and, as we see in the end, almost all of them still surf, skate or work in the surf/skate industry. How many of us can say that we have been able to live our lives and have been successful by breaking all the rules and doing what we love to do? They can. My hat's off to the Dogtown and Z-Boys for being themselves and changing the world of skateboarding forever.


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