And the sign said "Long-haired freaky people need not apply": "Dogtown and the Z-Boys"

This may stun you, but I never got into the whole skateboarding thing when I was a kid. I'd like to say it was because I was above the hype, but the simple fact is that a one-legged moose would have been more coordinated than me on a skateboard. Awkward? Me? Noooooo ...

Even so, I'd heard "Dogtown and the Z-boys" was a decent documentary, and with the fictionalized version of a California skate team making boarding a bigtime business due to come out this summer, I figured I should see the real deal before Heath Ledger and Johnny Knoxville are unleashed on audiences.

The story: A bunch of surfers from the "Dogtown" part of L.A. find themselves not only skating when they can't catch waves but eventually pushing the envelope to the point that skateboarding becomes a major sport in its own right. This not only involves getting horizontal at a time when most skateboarding was vertical and had kids slaloming through cones, but also skating in empty swimming pools, which eventually spawned the half-pipe and vertical fun that we know and love today. Ooooh, look at the skinny boy flying through the air, kneepads and all!

As a pop culture history lesson, "Dogtown" is all right, although for a documentary there was probably a little too much hero worship. Gee, I don't know why, since the director was a Z-Boy himself. "We were damn cool, if I do say so my damn self." I suppose Sean Penn as the narrator lends a bit of gravitas, but after a while the grumpy old man in me was rearing his head. "Enough with the quick cuts and extreme camera angles!" "Why aren't you kids in school?" Another 20 minutes, and I actually would have yelled, "Get a job, you punks!"

In addition, some of these guys don't seem to have moved on much from their boarding days, which was a little sad. I appreciate you breaking the mold in your teens, but that stuff doesn't carry the same weight when you're in your 40s. No offense, pal, but you don't see me playing with G.I. Joes 20 years later. Not in public, at least.