Deck Dogz

Synopsis: The Doggies, three skate-mad teenagers (Sean Kennedy, Richard Wilson, Ho Thi Lu) living in Sydney's monotonous northern working class suburbs are in more than their fair share of trouble at home and school but they reckon that if they can get down to the city and win a prestigious skateboard competition they'll be vindicated.

Whilst 2004 was generally lamented as a poor year for Australian film, late in the day the independently financed and distributed, and as it turned out eerily titled, Bondi Tsunami snuck in and showed us that if the old dingo was looking pretty lame, its pups had energy to spare. Opening 2005, Steve Pasvolsky's debut feature confirms this message.

In what is a convenient template for the first time film-maker with an eye on youth-oriented entertainment values, Deck Dogz adopts the road movie format and like Bondi Tsunami, but unlike a couple of plodding category-related Australian contenders from last year, Under The Radar and Thunderstruck, does so inventively, intelligently and with a perfect pitch at its audience. There are no surprises plot-wise and the characters (who include a few token females) are conventionally sketched but that is hardly going to concern the film's target demographic, which is under-20s in general, skate-freaks in particular. The skating sequences are well-executed, there is very effective use made of animation to develop the story which is inventively structured and well-edited. And, as one would expect, a punchy soundtrack underpins the proceedings which are handled with self-deprecating good humour.

Whilst AFTRS graduate Pasvolsky whose short, Inja, was a 2002 Oscar nomination deserves recognition for his ability to handle his chosen genre with zest, no doubt a good deal of credit for the success of this film should go to industry veteran Bill Bennett who, with his partner Jennifer Cluff, was its producer. Also a seasoned writer and director with a strong inclination to commercial rather than art film-making, Bennett has himself creditable experience with the road movie, notably with Kiss or Kill (1997) and to a lesser extent Spider And Rose (1994). The combination of an old head on young shoulders has resulted in a film which is both impressively well-made and vigorously irreverent, for a domestic audience with enough Australian content to be recognizable but with a trans-national technical sophistication that easily matches comparable American product.

At least locally the critical establishment has been less than generous to this film, in particular expressing a good deal of righteous indignation at its supposedly brainless and youth-corrupting exculpation of the three protagonists who accidentally burn down a section of their high school whilst retrieving a confiscated skate-board. This must surely be one of the most misplaced misreadings of youth culture since the claim that rock n'roll was the devil's music. This movie may be sick but only in the harmlessly inverted way that that word is used by its target audience. If that means nothing to you you'd be advised to look elsewhere for more meaningful cinematic pleasures.

 

 

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