Shoot The Moon (2013)

• 71%
• 2013
• Documentary

Skateboarders are such a part of the city that you rarely notice them, unless you're one of the police or security guards hired to run them off. Shoot the Moon, which is almost entirely free of dialogue and interviews, makes you notice them. Moreover, this show of extreme skills is framed as a statement of local pride to the valley-from downtown San Jose to Gilroy. It's easy to nurse a love/hate affair with the valley, to love what's left of green rural surroundings, to love the wide-open feel of it-and to hate the sprawl, the cookie-cutter construction, the too-quietness of the nights, and the less-appealing aspects of a boom town and a company town. So Shoot the Moon is as locally specific a film as any ever made here. It's a celebration of that local pride that goes beyond the emblems the skaters wear, on their shirts or on their skin. Never saw a tattoo for the minor-league San Jose Giants before... This team of experts seizes the landscape-the plazas, the parking lots, the concrete flood channels and dull deserted schoolyards somewhere in the Evergreen area. They turn this suburban negativeland into something exciting. Shooting with fish-eye lenses, Taylor rolls along, narrowly avoiding the concrete obstacles and the other riders. He and his crew follow BEST at ground level, so the jumps and spins seem even more impressive and hard to believe.