Stacy Peralta

When I was a kid, and skateboard was becoming a bona fide trend, I jumped on board with everyone else.  My skating was no more than rolling up and down the driveway on the surfboard on wheels that someone gave me for Christmas.  I never really bought in, fully, but I wanted to look like I had.

There were two brands at the time that were the epitome of skating: Vision (with "Gator" Rogowski) and Powell/Peralta.

Stacy Peralta was one of the original Venice Beach skaters, and he made his name by becoming a pioneer of the Skate Video craze.  He's managed to turn that into a full-fledged film career, now.  He's made two great documentaries: Dogtown and the Z Boys and Riding Giants.  They are both similar in their tone and style, but that doesn't make one any less interesting than the other.

They both highlight sports which were underground at best (despite the fact that both of them had massive peaks of popularity) but the films don't try to dazzle us with "awesome thrashing action" so much as they try to tell us about the people and pioneers involved in their origins.  Of course, the fact that the original skaters and surfers were merely kids themselves makes it all the more fascinating.

"Dogtown" takes the Venice Beach surfers, and shows their evolution from surfer bums to "land-surfers" to bona fide stars.  Watching the film now, with interviews with the originals looking back on it all, you get a real understanding that these were just kids who didn't fit in, didn't want to do organized sports, and found out that they were really good at something that no one else even knew existed.

It would be as if one of the games you and your friends made up when you were kids suddenly became the biggest, and most hip thing on the planet.

The one quote from the film that always stuck out for me was from Tony Alva, talking about how they used to bring in gas-powered pumps, pump the water out of some unsuspecting suburbanite's pool, saying "You just didn't know how long you'd be able to be there before the cops showed up.  So, when a pool opened up, you couldn't sit there and be scared... you had to skate that shit!"

"Riding Giants" is not a stretch for Peralta, as skateboarding cropped up out of surfing to begin with.  Peralta turns his camera on the Big Wave surfers, first in Hawaii, with Mark Fu, to Southern California, and then finally to tow-in surfing with Laird Hamilton.

What becomes apparent in the film is that the people involved did it because they didn't want to live a life of regret.  If you saw that wave come crest, and you weren't out there because you were too scared, you'd regret it for the rest of your life.  The film's finale highlight's a moment when Laird Hamilton caught and rode the greatest wave that anyone has ever seen ridden.  He went in the pipe, and then came out the other side a humbled legend.

These are intensely interesting films, and Peralta has carved out a place for himself in this genre.  He's got a way of capturing the attitude and atmosphere surrounding his subjects rather than just capturing the subjects themselves and it legitimizes the activities that might otherwise have been considered wastes of time.

Comments

[alleyrat]

okay, now you have to review the gator movie.

not as much fun. way more disturbing!

[aldahlia]

He's got another one called Step Into Blue about surfing worldwide. It's not as intense as Riding Giants, but it has the Mavericks crew and some other fun stuff.