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This
week's featured review & film archive
Sarah Jaffe reviews
independent and foreign films,
in addition to reporting the latest buzz behind
Colorado's film festivals.
STOKED: The Rise and Fall of Gator
--2003, Helen Stickler
Stoked opens with Mark "Gator" Rogowski,
at the height of his popularity, talking about
his desire to beat fear. He comes off like a self-assured,
happy kid. And why shouldn't he? He's young, has
a beautiful girlfriend, a huge house, and gets
paid more than most people see in a year in one
month from sales of his signature skateboard alone.
Not to mention, he's got all of this because of
skateboarding, something he loves to do.
Then, in 1991, Gator confessed to the rape and
murder of a 20-year-old girl. He was 24.
This documentary does more than just tell the
story of Gator. It tells the story of skateboarding
in the '80s, when swimming pools and vert ramps
ruled and a bunch of teenagers made more money
than they knew what to do with for doing something
most kids only got in trouble for doing. Some
of them, like Tony Hawk, managed to avoid the
pitfalls of the time and make a serious career
for themselves. Others, like Gator, ended up in
prison or worse.
Stickler doesn't mean to say that skateboarding
made Gator a killer. She does, however, examine
the effects of commercialization on something
that is less a sport than a "combination
between artistic expression and athleticism,"
as one of the skaters says. That skateboarding
is so personal, much more so than team sports,
makes it that much more difficult to seperate
it from life, and that much harder to deal when
the fame starts to wane. Stickler doesn't cover
Gator's family life or other factors that could
have contributed to what he became, but she does
an excellent job of showing the skateboard scene
of the time, and how the money and fleeting nature
of fame could affect these kids, who had no one
to teach them how to deal with it. Gator may be
an extreme example, but coping with the pressures
of fame is not a new problem in these times (Kurt
Cobain, anyone?).
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