Tag: skateboarding

Screening Room: ‘All the Streets are Silent’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

Jeremy Elkin’s new documentary, All the Streets are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997) is playing now in limited release.

My review is at PopMatters:

At the risk of stoking the embers of East and West Coast rivalry, it seems self-evident that when it came to incubating subcultures in the late 20th century, New York has it over Los Angeles every single time. When artists wanted to chill out under the palm trees, maybe take a few meetings, they winged out to the Southland. But no matter how grungy Venice Beach might have been in the 1980s or spookily desolate LA’s downtown looked, the half-abandoned pre-war grid of downtown Manhattan was where culture was born…

Here’s the trailer:

New in Theaters: “Bones Brigade: An Autobiography”

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, OmniculturalLeave a comment

The best sports-as-life documentary of the year, and a great story to boot, Stacey Peralta’s Bones Brigade: An Autobiography is playing now in pretty limited release. It should come to DVD and cable soon and is well worth seeking out.

My review is at PopMatters:

Stacey Peralta’s bright and curiously lovely new film takes up not longer after Dogtown and Z-Boys ends, with the dissolution of the Z-Boys. This time, the filmmaker puts himself front-and-center in the interviews that provide a spine for a stream of old VHS skate footage and faded photographs. As he tells it, Peralta refashioned himself as the ringleader for a new crew of bright young skateboarders. After co-forming the skate equipment company Powell-Peralta, which would serve as munitions factory for the sport’s underground resurgence in the 1980s, Peralta put together a squad of improbably talented and driven pre-teens he could mold into stars. Given that the roster included guys like Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, and Lance Mountain, the feat that Peralta accomplished is something akin to discovering the entire Dream Team before they had even entered high school…

You can see the trailer here: