EW review: Hooray for 'Dogtown'
By Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- When the sullen and fearless blond teenage boys in "Lords of Dogtown" ride their skateboards, never pausing to think about anything that isn't directly in front of them, the movie joins them right on the pavement, racing forward with grungy velocity, showing us what the skaters are seeing and feeling as they ride along back alleys, dilapidated asphalt playgrounds, and any other available surface: a world of trash transcended.
The camera, sharing the high, threads its way through a double row of cars, and it's like a moment out of a Jerry Bruckheimer chase thriller, except that there's nothing at all fanciful or exaggerated about it. The sequence gives you a charge because it's entirely real -- a God-on-the-street's-eye view of skateboard heaven.
The year is 1975, and the daredevil boarders -- Stacy Peralta (John Robinson), Tony Alva (Victor Rasuk), and Jay Adams (Emile Hirsch) -- are the original skate punks. They're from Venice and Santa Monica, a.k.a. Dogtown, a rough-and-tumble ''ghetto by the sea'' that's nevertheless been touched by the stoned karma of surf culture.
The surfers, macho as bikers, are a fading breed, but the skateboarders are too young to have tasted the '60s. They're disaffected hippie fallout, the long-haired sleepy children of divorce and drugs, and they translate surf moves -- the extremes of balance and plunging bravado -- from water to concrete. They take a pastime that's little more than a hula hoop novelty and turn it into a sexy, thrashing assertion of underground style.
"Lords of Dogtown" is a docudrama, rare in its grit and authenticity, that also strives for the mythical youth-rebel excitement of something like "8 Mile." The film was written by Peralta himself, and it stays extremely close to the events laid out in his superb 2002 documentary, "Dogtown and Z-Boys."
We see the introduction of urethane wheels, which allow the skaters to grip any surface, and we meet Skip Engblom, the bedraggled burnout of a surf-shop owner who organizes the kids into the Zephyr Team, which becomes their debauched surrogate family. Skip is played by Heath Ledger, who gives a witty performance as a sloshed old lion who still has some bite left.
The first time the Z-Boys show up at a competition, skating to Black Sabbath, it's hilarious -- they're like devil hooligans invading a garden party. But they become a sensation. You might say that they're escaping the reality of their lives, except that the director, Catherine Hardwicke ("Thirteen"), shows you how skateboarding, for these kids, is reality -- the only one they care about. When they sneak into emptied-out swimming pools during a Southern California drought, riding their boards up and over the walls of the curvy smooth basins, it's because they're looking for a more bone-jangling rush, a way to cut through the numbness, to vent their aggression as they soar. The pools become bowls of vertical bliss.
Hardwicke is the rare director whose work is at once kinesthetic and delicate. She stages "Lords of Dogtown" with a rushing, caught-on-the-fly realism that may, in the end, prove more artful than commercial, yet she makes her characters vibrant and full. The contrasting temperaments of the brash, moonstruck Tony, the chivalrous Stacy, and the moody, troubled Jay come to the fore gradually, as they're confronted with success. The three become stars, boy kings of the '70s media/endorsement culture, and in different ways
it tears each of them apart. But that, the movie says, is tied to the nature of what they invented: a sport that never had any motive beyond the go-for-broke impulse of flying off the next curve.
EW Grade: A
'Rock School'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
On stage, a budding guitar god -- he's perhaps 12 -- whips off the opening solo to ''Black Magic Woman'' as if he'd been sprung from the rib of Carlos Santana.
Sound at all familiar?
I've always thought that movies should be watched, and judged, independently of each other, yet I'd be lying if I didn't admit that "Rock School," Don Argott's amusing and spirited documentary, would seem a heck of a lot niftier if its fire hadn't already been stolen by "School of Rock." Whether or not that great 2003 Jack Black comedy was ''inspired'' by the Paul Green School of Rock Music (a wee bit of controversy has already swirled around the issue), the novelty of kids learning to play rock & roll in a structured setting, absorbing a ''devil chord'' as systematically as a Bach triad, no longer carries the same zing.
Green, a testy and demanding fellow who has run his school in Philadelphia since 1998, is a bigger control freak than Jack Black ever was; he's more like Dave Matthews played by Paul Giamatti. Most of Green's students are teenagers rather than grade-schoolers, and his most distinctive achievement is teaching them to play some of Frank Zappa's trippiest riffs.
When they attend the annual Zappa festival in Germany, where they perform ''Inca Roads'' in concert with veteran Zappa sideman Napoleon Murphy Brock, it's funny and moving to see this eccentric nugget of boomer virtuosity played by a generation that has absolutely no idea how weird it was.
EW Grade: B
'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
 America Ferrera, Blake Lively, Alexis Bledel and Amber Tamblyn in "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants." |  |
Rule No. 1 when discussing "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants": It's okay for a grown movie critic to admit she cried freely and with great feeling for more than half the movie, and grinned like a dork through the remainder.
The sob-smiles flowed as 16-year-old Best Friends Forever Bridget (Blake Lively), Carmen (America Ferrera), Lena (Alexis Bledel), and Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) spend their first summer apart from one another, dealing with everything that's alternately thrilling (love) and seriously not fair (death) about life. Binding the quartet together is a magical pair of jeans, passed from friend to friend, that fits perfectly (also not fair) over their four very different-size butts.
Rule No. 2: It's okay to use tears and smiles, honestly evoked, as a measure of "Pants' " warmth and effectiveness. Ann Brashares' super-selling young-adult novel became a hit because, although not every woman feels like a member of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, or the First Wives Club, or the Joy Luck Club, or is Waiting to Exhale, or Trying to Get Her Groove Back, every woman has, at one time, been 16 years old. TV-honed director Ken Kwapis ("Malcolm in the Middle") knows this, and moves the action along with the same easy, frequent jumps between adventures that Brashares conjures on the page.
Rule No. 3: It's okay that the screenplay, by femme-flick pros Delia Ephron and Elizabeth Chandler, diverges from the book, because the tone remains true to the seat of the "Pants."
Rule No. 4: The more roles that go to the fresh, charming, untabloidy "Pants" cast, the better. (That Tamblyn and Bledel happen to have TV identities as "Joan of Arcadia" and a "Gilmore Girl" is just ... a bonus.) And as a subset of this rule: Ferrera, the great young star of "Real Women Have Curves," can branch out whenever she likes. But the longer she goes on representing the interests of Hispanic Americans with such flair, and speaking out for young women who are totally at home in their full flesh, the greater the opportunity for women of all colors and sizes to see beauty on screen that looks like theirs. Ours.
Rule No. 5: Anyone who books a trip to the Greek island of Santorini after watching Lena bud and blossom with a first beau in the Mediterranean sun must confess, in writing, that it was "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" that did the selling.
EW Grade: B+
'Apres Vous'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Auteur theorists are excused from any discussion of "Apres Vous," a throwback populist French romantic comedy directed by Pierre Salvadori with the anti-elitist (and anti-psychiatric) elan to suggest that any suicidal know-nothing can pass himself off as a wine expert if lent the right bow tie.
Louis (Jose Garcia, with the moist eyes of Robert Downey Jr.), the depressive in question, is in the process of hanging himself from a Paris park tree when he's saved by passing stranger Antoine (seasoned Daniel Auteuil, recalling his early comic roles before "Jean de Florette"). A loser at love with more neuroses up his arsenal than "The Odd Couple's" Felix Unger, Louis is ungrateful; a manager at a Paris brasserie and a hapless nice guy, Antoine is undeterred from doing unwanted good.
Rehabilitation of his prize booby includes giving Louis a job as a sommelier (with advice to always recommend a burgundy) and tracking down the jilted lover's ex (Sandrine Kiberlain).
The pileup of complications, the animated title sequence, and even the pop song that bounces the action along are weightlessly silly -- and unabashedly nice. Suicidal depression has rarely looked so amusing.
EW Grade: B
'Second Best'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Like a lot of people, I'm such a fan of Joe Pantoliano's paint-scraping whine, and of the squirrelly intelligence behind it, that I'm always rooting for him to land a role as plum as he's had on "The Sopranos" or in "Memento." "Second Best" isn't it, even though the film takes off from an intriguing acid spill of an idea.
Pantoliano plays a New Jersey suit salesman who thinks he's the ultimate loser. He flaunts it in a ranting newsletter that reads like nerd Charles Bukowski, and by goading his pals into humiliating him. "Second Best" might have made a good stage monologue, but as a film it's overstated and barely baked.
EW Grade: C
'Pure'
Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling
Keira Knightley smokes ''gear'' -- a.k.a. heroin -- with a 10-year-old kid played by Harry Eden in "Pure," a British drama filmed in 2002 and released now with Knightley's china-shop mug all over the poster.
Although it's a supporting role, Knightley glows with the bound-for-glory newness of an emerging star. "Pure," however, belongs to Eden, a remarkably strong child actor, and "Deadwood's" Molly Parker, broken and affecting as his sweaty, gear-crazy mum.
Though he throws a little too much whimsy into the Ken Loach-ian dramatics, director Gillies MacKinnon ("Hideous Kinky") forges a very wrenching and believable bond between Parker and Eden. It seems like it would really suck having a smackhead for a mother.
EW Grade: B
Click Here
to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly
