Skate Kitchen

2018 skateboarding movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: A teenager struggling to connect with her mother finds camaraderie in a female skateboarding posse.

Skateboarding and horse movies! That's what 2018 was all about. This is the worst of the skateboarding movies that I saw this year, and I kept having to reflect on whether it was because so much of it is about female friendships and female issues and mother/daughter relationships that I had trouble connecting with because I'm a middle-aged man. Likely, it's more to do with dialogue like this:

Protagonist: What's your favorite color?
One of Will Smith's kids: Red.
Protagonist: Is that why you turned your hair red?
One of Will Smith's kids: Yeah.
Protagonist: Nice.

Rarely does the dialogue get more profound than that. And oddly, since this is almost a documentary/narrative hybrid with this real Skate Kitchen collective, the characters don't feel all that authentic, at least when they're not on skateboards. They seemed natural when showing off on their skateboards, but in scenes where they weren't on their boards, their hamming-it-up didn't work. The word "valid" was also overused. I just didn't connect with the characters, and I didn't really feel like their relationships had any depth to them. A conflict develops early on but then doesn't seem to matter all that much, and all other attempts at narrative just seem half-assed. I wonder if director Crystal Moselle should have just made a documentary about Skate Kitchen instead.

It doesn't take long for this to feel repetitive, and stylistic touches later--including some unnecessary slow-mo that just made an already too-long movie feel that much longer--annoyed me. Also annoying was the score. I didn't even know that ambient music could be oppressive.