Tuesday, April 10, 2012

SKATELAND, A Review

For a long time I thought Skateland was going to be my "Rosebud." I'd die with the title on my lips, the unseen film my final regret, my loved ones bewildered by what on earth my last utterance could have meant. And no amount of shoe leather from an intrepid reporter would uncover the mystery of what I'd been talking about, since by then (the year 2147) no one would know what the fuck Skateland was. But it shall not be so, now, as Skateland is finally on Netflix Instant! And so I saw it after literal years of covering its deeply troubled release. Was it worth it?

Hahahahahaha of course not.

Skateland is a coming-of-age story, and I mean so much so that I'm pretty sure at one point someone tells the main character, "You're coming of age, son!" (Of course I can't be entirely sure, since most of the dialogue in this movie is the speaking equivalent of white noise.) It follows Richie Wheeler, who has been spinning his wheels (sorry) for a while in Texas in the 1980s. He has a few friends, I think, and is sort of popular, I think, and he is a gifted writer, I think. But none of that is particularly emphasized (you can't even really say that his friends are stock characters, because even stock characters can at least be described in more than one sentence). And he works at a roller-skating rink and he loves it. (That much is very clear, from the idiot grin on Richie's face the first time we see him, at work. The first lines of this movie, by the way? Guy 1: "Woo!" Guy 2: "Yeah!")
Then Richie's parents announce they're getting divorced, and his boss tells him he's shutting Skateland down. WOMP WOMP. And so Richie must contemplate his next move. Or not.
From there, you could have a quiet, if derivative movie about young adult angst and small-town mentalities, and I wouldn't have begrudged Skateland for doing that. Instead, it oddly tries to balance being a quiet, modern (well, like 2006-modern) indie flick with being a throwback 80's teen comedy. I mean, look:
(That's real, I swear.) And those two tones are rarely, if ever, struck at the same time. So there are reflective montages (Richie walks, smokes, broods; Richie drives, smokes, broods) and long, static takes (two out of three of which are markedly stilted, the actors waiting and seeming to almost drift out of character between lines, as though they assumed there would be a cut somewhere). And Richie's family is so Indie it hurts (sad sack father, wise-beyond-years younger sister, difficult and complicated mother). But there are also corny camping sequences, and a kind of lame Greek chorus of nerds who comment on the party scenes.
Somewhere in the middle is Richie's friend Jeter Sarsgaard (okay, not his name, but it should be), who is every bastard child of Neal Cassidy ever written rolled into one guy.
There is exactly one clever sequence, in which Richie flashes back to a boat trip after a car accident. And by the way, let's hear it for Ashley Greene's pre-emaciated 2008 body! Woo! Yeah!
Speaking of AG, I think she acquits herself rather nicely. She doesn't have a lot to do for most of the movie, a lot of her scenes go like this:

GIRL: My boyfriend is abusing me.
AG: [Meaningful look]


RICHIE: My parents are getting divorced.
AG: [Meaningful look]

(Her underdeveloped motivations can be kind of interesting though--at one point she shows up at Richie's house and abruptly fucks him. And I'm all for abrupt fucking. I do wish that a thread about her character being a music snob were explored more thoroughly, though that is mostly for selfish reasons and wouldn't necessarily benefit The Good Of The Film.)
Toward the end, she gets to Act a little more. In fact, the one good long-take holds on her face during a long-ish, emotionally charged conversation with Richie. What's a little strange is that as the camera pushes in on her, Richie is gradually cut out of the frame until he's gone entirely--and he doesn't even seem to have a mic on him. He sounds distant, like in a gag reel. Not that I blame the filmmakers for ditching him when they can; Shiloh Fernandez is a black hole at the center of this movie, betraying human emotion almost never. I can't even imagine that he's very attractive to the womenfolk, either. Dude looks like Joaquin Phoenix got late-onset Benjamin Button disease.
(AG also manages a single tear with startling efficiency. Put that on your reel, girl! Not the rest of this, though.) So most of this movie is pretty dumb, and uninteresting, and atonal. And when Richie mentions someone calling his Skateland essay a "compelling portrait of suburban life" or whatever it feels like the director is high-fiving himself. Ugh. AND YET! And yet the end of this fucker won me over. I mean, there's a mix-tape-making montage. A MIX-TAPE-MAKING MONTAGE! How can you not love that unequivocally?
In the end, I guess I would recommend this movie to you, as something to watch on a Saturday afternoon or something. We used to call these movies "good rentals" but that is starting to feel like an outdated term. "Red Boxy," how about that? This movie is Red Boxy. Did you watch it? I sort of feel like you owe it to me to do so.

4 comments:

Kim said...

Coincidentally enough, this disc is next up on my Netflix for this weekend.

Anonymous said...

Sounds God awful, I will watch it and report back. 80s!

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1zMx4Eltbo

zipzopzazzy said...

Red Boxy sounds like it's x-rated and has a speech impediment.