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Critics Consensus: Dogtown and Z-Boys is a colorful, exhilarating look at the skateboarding subculture.
Critic Consensus: Dogtown and Z-Boys is a colorful, exhilarating look at the skateboarding subculture.
All Critics (95) | Top Critics (32) | Fresh (87) | Rotten (8) | DVD (8)
You want to know more about their private lives than you get. But most viewers may be too stoked by the sheer adrenaline rush of the subject to care.
Package is lively, if loosely structured.
This propulsive, highly satisfying 2002 documentary concerns a group of daredevil skateboarders from an economically depressed and dangerous area of Santa Monica known as Dogtown who reinvented the sport in the 70s.
Infectiously exuberant.
Few sports films catch their time, place and sport so well.
This is pop history that blows your hair back.
Raw, baby, raw. That's what this documentary is, and that's why it's not meant for Blu-ray.
Before Tony Hawk, skateboarding had the Z-Boys.
Skateboard-legend-turned-filmmaker Stacy Peralta rips open the paradigm of the documentary form in much the same way that he and his young Santa Monica Zephyr Competition Skate Team revolutionized skateboarding in the mid-'70s.
Marred by a self-importance and heavy-handed assertion of mythic status that some may well find misplaced or just downright ridiculous.
I know exactly nothing about skateboarding, but this wild, exuberant documentary puts it all in perspective, outlining a crew of 12 surfers-turned-skaters who pioneered the sport -- and, some say, the art form.
Using the Zephyr team's creation, its sudden fame, and death by defection, Dogtown documents genuine 20th century tribalism.
Skip Engblom: Children took the ruins of the 20th century and made art out of it. "The Birth of Extreme" Dogtown and Z-Boys is one of the more entertaining documentaries I've ever seen and actually one of the first documentaries I remember watching. The craziest thing about my love for this movie, is that skateboarding and everything that goes with it, isn't something that really interests me. Stacey Peralta, who is a fantastic documentary filmmaker, know exactly how to keep this movie fast paced and interesting. The movie did end up making me interested in the Z-Boys story. It's enjoyable to see how these street kid, surfers reinvented a dying sport and made it something that everybody knew about. Main highlights of the film include concrete warfare, where they would sneak into people's backyards and ride their pools and also the first skate competition that the Zephyr skate team was a part of. If you've seen Lords of Dogtown and enjoyed it, this is something you should give a look. It's a great companion film to Lords of Dogtown and both are fun and entertaining films to watch. If getting the more in depth look into the movement is important to you, then Dogtown and Z-Boys is the way to go.
Super Reviewer
Interesting documentary on the birth of skateboarding. Best watched as a companion piece with the superior 'Lords of Dogtown'.
"This is concrete warfare we're talking about... if you're going to ride you gotta get on that shit." Documentary about the pioneering 1970s Zephyr skating team.
Sean Penn was in this? Oh yes he was the narrator. That explains why I didn't see him. It takes a special documentary to make a person who doesn't care about a subjec to take an interest in it. I have no interest in the 1970s Zephyr team and I don't have much interest afterwards. Very insider baseball.
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