Lords of Dogtown (2005)
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke
The radical true story behind three teenage surfers from Venice Beach, California, who took skateboarding to the extreme and changed the world of sports forever. Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva and Jay Adams are the Z-Boys, a bunch of nobodies until they create a new style of skateboarding that becomes a worldwide phenomenon. But when their hobby becomes a business, the success shreds their friendship.
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What critics compared Lords of Dogtown to
It lacks the authenticity of Catherine Hardwicke’s Los Angeles-set Lords of Dogtown (2005), whose story about hopeless boys was, unexpectedly, even more convincingly empathetic than her female-puberty debut Thirteen had been.
It’s true that Hill pulls from the great dramatic skate movies — Larry Clark’s Kids and Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown come to mind — and that his film comes amidst a revival of the genre, with films like Skate Kitchen and Minding the Gap pushing it to the forefront of the film industry, but that’s hardly his fault that a trend coalesced before he even screened the thing publicly.
Director Catherine Hardwicke ("Thirteen"), who replaced David Fincher on the project, clearly has no real feel for this material.
That said, this narrative re-creation of Peraltaâs doc, from his own script and directed by Thirteenâs Catherine Hardwicke, is a blast, as accurate as it ought to be with more than enough mythology thrown in for good measure.
Hardwicke directed 2003's Thirteen, one of the great debut features of the past 20 years, and her follow-up has the same impassioned empathy for the unpolished and dispossessed, the kids for whom Stanford does not beckon.
Now Peralta has turned screenwriter, dramatizing their story in no-holds-barred fashion but entrusting the film's direction to Catherine Hardwicke, an inspired choice, given the insight and compassion for troubled, reckless teens she revealed so memorably in "Thirteen."
It's also less sensational than Hardwick's last project, Thirteen, a compelling depiction of teens, sex and drugs.
Don't forget the girlfriends, who include Marisol Diaz (Raising Victor Vargas), Nikki Reed (Thirteen), and America Ferrera (Real Women Have Curves).
Hardwicke's early films, "Thirteen" and "Lords of Dogtown," felt stripped-down and immediate, and they vividly conveyed the restlessness of youth.
Like director Catherine Hardwicke's previous features, "Thirteen," "Lords of Dogtown," the teen-vampire megahit "Twilight" and, yes, the New Testament-inspired "The Nativity Story," "Red Riding Hood" is an extreme coming-of-age story about young people coping with or plunging themselves into extraordinary circumstances.
After starting off strong with Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, the once promising filmmaker has created two of the worst supernatural thrillers in recent memory in Twilight and now the excruciating Red Riding Hood.
Her stronger films (Thirteen, the underrated Lords of Dogtown) display a willingness to explore the inner lives of edgy young people.
The movie was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who in palmier days gave us such well-regarded films as Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown.