April 6 movie: Dogtown and Z-Boys. Having already seen this movie several times, Georg wondered why I had gotten it from Netflix. I kind of wondered myself. Well, it's been a couple of years. We don't get IFC anymore, which is where I saw it before. And I heard a story about Iggy Pop on NPR, and they played a bit of "I Wanna Be Your Dog," and it reminded me of this movie and made me want to see it again.
The music is excellent throughout. Actually, the amazing thing is that it isn't. A lot of the soundtrack selections are things that I would flee the room if they came on the radio. Somehow in the context of the movie, Peralta makes even the bad songs work. (With a couple of exceptions; "Maggie Mae" and "Cat Scratch Fever" still make me cringe.)
While watching Georg and I talked about what it is that makes this movie work. Somehow Peralta manages to capture the excitement of creating a new subculture. I've never gone near a skateboard but he made me feel like I understood what it was about. I saw his surfing documentary, Riding Giants, and it didn't have that energy at all. In fact I found it so boring that I didn't even finish it. Why does Dogtown and Z-Boys succeed where Riding Giants failed? Partly it has to be that Peralta was telling his own story in Dogtown. Otherwise, I don't know. Maybe it's due to my age, that I find 70s skate punks (who were only slightly older than me) more interesting than 60s surfer dudes. Do people who were teenagers in the 60s like Riding Giants better than I did?
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