News

On Jan. 19, 2001, Stacy Peralta’s skateboarding documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys lit up the Sundance Film Festival, going on to earn multiple honors in Park City and, later, a feature film treatment, Lords of Dogtown. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below:

Where the debris meets the sea, that’s the tight scope on Dogtown and Z-Boys. It’s a wild ride with eight boarders from Venice Beach, Calif., that was a deserved co-winner of the Audience Award for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival. Director Stacy Peralta also deservedly garnered the director honor in the documentary category.

Carved through the waves and asphalt of Venice, Dogtown follows the daring exploits of a tight-‘n’-tough band of wayward teens, outsiders who assaulted the softblue world of ’70s surfing. Hardened from single-parent homes and charged with pent-up energies, they took to the waves with a take-no-prisoners style.

At its best,...

Exclusive: Former Legendary Entertainment executive Vasco Xu is joining forces with Hong Kong business exec Brian Cheng and Chinese venture capitalist Sun Ge to launch a Los Angeles and Beijing-based international production venture, Conqueror Entertainment.

Cheng and Sun will both serve as Co-Founders, with Xu as Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, overseeing corporate affairs, creative development, production, marketing, distribution and franchise management. Cheng is a member of one of Hong Kong’s biggest business families, while Sun is the founder Chinese Vc company Grains Valley.

Xu said the company will develop and produce feature films and series, both in English and Chinese, for the international and domestic Chinese market. It will have a dual track production strategy – producing English-language content for global distribution, and Chinese content aimed solely at the local market.

Conqueror’s debut slate of projects includes Legendary/Tencent’s female-driven action comedy series Killer Maid, based on...

Martyn Robertson’s film follows a 14-year-old Scottish surfing champion as he prepares to take on Ireland’s biggest waves

If anyone’s come up with an image more cinematic than a matchstick-sized man riding a tsunami of a wave, I’ve yet to see it. And Ride the Wave’s matchstick man ratchets up the tension by being a 14-year-old boy: Ben Larg, a Scottish junior surfing champion based on the Hebridean island of Tiree. Normally, big-wave surfing documentaries focus on lantern-jawed, seasoned watermen, but Martyn Robertson’s film has an interestingly vulnerable edge by focusing on the stripling Larg’s desire to tackle Aileen’s and Mullaghmore, two of the cold-water breaks on Ireland’s west coast – and how his parents manage their stress levels accordingly.

One minute Larg is a blond-bobbed grommet, with more than a passing resemblance to the late Dogtowner Jay Adams, crying after flunking his heats at international competitions.

Writer/director Catherine Hardwicke talks about her favorite intense movies with Josh.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Citizen Kane (1941)

Thirteen (2003)

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

Heat and Sunlight (1987)

Angelo My Love (1983)

Kids (1995)

Out Of The Blue (1980)

The Wanderers (1979)

Mean Streets (1973)

A Woman Under The Influence (1974)

Husbands (1970)

City of God (2002)

Boys Don’t Cry (1999)

The Next Karate Kid (1994)

Million Dollar Baby (2004)

Hair (1979)

The Hangover (2009)

Porky’s (1981)

Hamburger: The Motion Picture (1986)

Twilight (2008)

The Nativity Story (2006)

Pariah (2011)

Mudbound (2017)

Sex And The City: The Movie (2008)

The Florida Project (2017)

Tangerine (2015)

The Ocean of Helena Lee (2015)

Other Notable Items

Rob Nilsson

Sundance Film Festival

Robert Duvall

Larry Clark

Peanuts comic strip (1950-2000)

Charles M. Schulz

Chloe Sevigny

Rosario Dawson

Heath Ledger

Linda Manz

Dennis Hopper

Philip Kaufman

Ken Wahl

The Wanderers novel by Richard Price (1974)

Robert De Niro

John Cassavetes

Gena Rowlands

Fernando Meirelles

Kátia Lund

Kimberly Pierce

Hillary Swank

Scarlett Johansson

Treat Williams

John Savage

The Eli...

Jay Adams, a skateboarding legend who is credited with helping to shape modern skateboarding style, has died. He was 53. The Santa Monica, California, native died Friday in a hospital in Puerto Escondido, in Mexico, where he was on an extended surfing trip, reports the Los Angeles Times. It's believed he died of a heart attack. Adams gained attention in 2001 when he was featured prominently in Dogtown and Z-Boys, an award-winning documentary about Adams and childhood friends Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva. The teenagers formed Z-boys in the '70s in the Dogtown neighborhood of Santa Monica and unwittingly pioneered modern skateboarding,...

Skater enthusiasts will love the new documentary short film “Day at the Pool.” The documentary short is now available online through the film’s official site as Xbox and iTunes. The film explores the beginnings of what we now know to be modern skateboarding: “Day At The Pool is a documentary short film which sheds new light on the true origins of modern skateboarding. The film features blazing interviews with Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, Jay Adams and the rest of the Dogtown crew. They all reveal that one anonymous kid from the swimming-pool suburbs of Los Angeles may have been singularly responsible for the skateboarding revolution that redefined adolescent life in [ Read More ]

The post Day At The Pool Now Available Online appeared first on Shockya.com.

So there they were ... a couple from San Diego driving along a California road ... when they pick up a hitchhiker -- naturally -- who turns out to be one of the Greatest Living Skateboard Legends Ever!!!It's a crazy video -- the couple tells us, they routinely pick up hitchhikers and film them (call it a hobby), but this week ... they hit the hitchhiker jackpot, picking up none other than skater legend Jay Adams, who...

Dogtown And Z-boys (Blu-raySONY Home ENTERTAINMENT2002/Rated PG-13/91 minsNow Available – List Price $24.95By the mid seventies, skateboarding was considered to be a sixties fad that had all but died out, except for a handful of committed fans in Santa Monica, California. When a group of surfers known as the Zephyr team sought to translate the phenomenal stunts of world-class wave riders onto their skateboards, they had no idea they were giving birth to modern skateboarding. At the Santa Monica Surf Shop, Zephyr Productions, twelve of these surfers organized themselves into a team to compete at local skate events with the help of the store's owners Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom. Soon the radical moves and urban style of the Zephyr Skate Team, aka Z-Boys, destroyed public preconceptions of skateboarding as a sport and a lifestyle, and the pioneering styles of Z-Boy skaters like Tony Alva, Jim Muir, and Jay Adams...

(Young Stacy Peralta, above, right, in Dogtown and Z-Boys.)

The Accidental Revolutionary

by Terry Keefe

(Our line-up of previously unposted interviews from the Naughties continues with my short talk in 2002 with Stacy Peralta, whose Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary went on to spawn an entire sub-genre in the documentary world - as in, "It's Dogtown and Z-Boys set in the formative days of 'fill-in-the-blank sport.'" In 2005, Dogtown was also adapted into the popular narrative feature, Lords of Dogtown, which was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and gave an early career boost to Emile Hirsch. It also featured a very off-beat performance from Heath Ledger, indicating what he was really capable of as an actor aside from the pretty boy roles he had been typecast in previously. This article originally appeared in Venice Magazine.)

If there had been a few more days of rain in Southern California in the early 70’s, today...

Even though Christmas has passed and we’re into the new year, there’s always time for new DVD releases. This week’s releases include , and the second Dawn of the Dead, End of Days, The Green Berets and 10 Things I Hate About You. Of these releases, we are all pretty excited about The Last Starfighter (pictured above).

Check out this week’s releases:

Movies

Cheaper by the Dozen 2 ~ Bonnie Hunt, Shawn Levy (Blu-ray)

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ~ Anna Faris (DVD and Blu-ray)

Dawn of the Dead (2004) ~ Sarah Polley (Blu-ray)

Dogtown and Z-Boys ~ Sean Penn, Jay Adams (Blu-ray)

End of Days (2pc) ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger (Blu-ray)

The Final Destination ~ Bobby Campo, Mykelti Williamson (Blu-ray and DVD)

The Green Berets ~ John Wayne (Blu-ray)

Last Starfighter ~ Lance Guest (Blu-ray)

10 Things I Hate About You ~ Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Julia Stiles (Blu-ray)

50 Dead Men Walking ~ Jim Sturgess, Sir Ben Kingsley,...