Starring: Mark Gator Rogowski, Tony Hawk, Jason Jessee, Himself John Brinton Hogan Script: Helen Stickler Running Time: 1:22 Country: USA Year: 2004 Official Site: Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator

Following the release of Dogtown and Z-Boys and preceding Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke's take on the scene with The Lords of Dogtown, Helen Stickler's Stoked follows the rise and fall of 80's skateboarding icon, Mark 'Gator' Rogowski.

When the movie opens, we learn that Gator is serving a sentence for murder in a California jail and from there the documentary unfolds his life from childhood to the gruesome act. I've never been into skateboarding culture and the idea of me getting on a board is as ridiculous as Cuba Gooding Jr. owning an Oscar. Still, I found myself quickly absorbed by a tale which shows the similarities between pro-circuit skateboarding and the rock scene while in the background, marketing slowly takes over the sports world.

Stickler's approach is a bit too academic in an era where documentaries have become so sophisticated at the visual and narrative levels, intertwining original footage and interviews. Stoked focuses on Gator's phenomenon rather than on his skating abilities—for this you can check the extras—and the character is colorful enough, without considering the murder, to offer a meaty documentary. Just like any story about the music or film business, we see how money and fame transformed a regular boy who ended up losing ground, becoming a caricature of himself, before turning into some pathetic and psychotic figure disconnected from the world. Except for superstar and savvy businessman Tony Hawk, it is also interesting to see what the former 80's skateboarding stars have become, most of them looking like 40 year old Huntington Beach surf bums—I especially enjoyed the Perry Farrell look-alike tattooed dude sharing his wisdom.

While Stickler's orientation is fair and neutral, neither ironic nor aficionado, I was still left with the feeling that some aspects of the party lifestyle had been left out—particularly the importance of sex and drugs, somewhat preserving the image of Gator's former "partners in crime". From the beginning to the end, the filmmaker envelops her narrative into a somewhat creepy tonality that will build up to a terrible conclusion, but the success of her endeavor mostly lies in the fact that she was able to create a film that would appeal as much to the skateboarding crowd as to the neophytes.

  Fred Thom