Dragonslayer: Skate Documentary

While the majority skateboarding documentaries these days tend to regress into boring sit-down interviews and pseudo-academic narratives, Tristan Patterson comes along with an honest, unapologetic portrayal of the scene with Dragonslayer. The movie follows the life and career of skateboarder Josh ‘Skreech’ Sandoval for an entire year, documenting his struggle to balance his love for skateboarding and the relentless demands of the real world. 

Dragonslayer's cinematography is superbly executed for a low-budget documentary that even scenes situated in the most dystopic environs like decrepit houses and graffiti-laden skate bowls bathe in ambrosial colors.

The documentary effectively establishes different moods by giving the viewers two distinct visual perspectives: a crisp third-person vantage point through Patterson’s high-definition camera (which loses focus from time to time), while Skreech, often incoherent and inebriated, provides a disorienting gonzo vantage point through his own grainy lo-def camcorder.

Skreech is a single father, a drug addict—and for better or worse—a skateboarder. He can be such a polarizing character, yet this movie has an allure tantamount to watching a spectacular car wreck unfold. Paradoxically, everything that he does (or fails to do) generates intrigue that makes the audience stay put and see if he still gets to walk away unscathed from it all in the end. 

Skateboarding is the only thing that appears to give Skreech's life some sense of meaning. Even when his relationship with other people like his girlfriend and his own kid are thrown off-balance, it’s quite apparent that Skreech becomes a different person when he skates. When he’s on his board, he’s suddenly aggressive, full of energy, graceful, and in control. However, as soon as he steps off the board, he reverts to his dopey behavior as he then finds himself stepping back to reality.

There's something truly genuine about this movie that most documentaries tend to lose or forget.

Patterson portrays the skate culture for what it is without any embellishments. In a way, he even cautions the audience that the type of freedom that punk ethos endows has its own limitations. Dragonslayer is not only a portrait of one person, but it also provides a riveting picture of America's disenfranchised youth as a whole. The movie is remorseless in exposing the excesses as well as all the frustrations of the American youth, punctuated by the visually powerful energy of radical skateboarding and occasional display of fireworks.

The movie reveals some ugly scars and open wounds behind the media-glorified facade of skateboarding subculture. Although it provides the viewers a fair amount of impressive bowl skating from Skreech and his friends, this movie is not a run-of-the-mill skate porn intended to brainwash the consumer with the skateboard industry's glorified brand of bad and cool.

Skreech does not romanticize the skater punk lifestyle. His strengths and flaws are excruciatingly real, it gives Dragonslayer the kind of authenticity warranted in a self-respecting counter-cultural film. Skreech's life, and Patterson's visual execution has an inexplicable way of pulling some heart strings in ways people do not expect, expecially from a movie that initially appears to be about a hopeless character.