Bovie Movie

Stacy Peralta, who directed the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) that charted the rise of three young skateboarders in California in the early 1970s, provides the script for this dramatisation of the same events. It’s a quick-moving, good-looking movie and its strengths are very much thanks to Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke, who utilises kinetic hand-held camerawork and rhythmic editing to give the film an intense immediacy. The weaknesses are all down to the script: the young heroes tread a well-worn path of tough childhoods, inspiring early successes and eventual heartache and betrayal, while trading dialogue such as “So, you’re like really famous now, huh?” However, the positives include the charismatic leads (with Heath Ledger delivering a broad and entertaining turn as skateboarding svengali Skip Engblom) and an outstanding soundtrack, as in the original documentary. 

When his army unit was ambushed during the first Gulf War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw saved his fellow soldiers just as his commanding officer, then-Captain Ben Marco, was knocked unconscious. Brokering the incident for political capital, Shaw eventually becomes a vice-presidential nominee, while Marco is haunted by dreams of what happened — or didn’t happen — in Kuwait. As Marco (now a Major) investigates, the story begins to unravel, to the point where he questions if it happened at all. Is it possible the entire unit was kidnapped and brainwashed to believe Shaw is a war hero as part of a plot to seize the White House? Some very powerful people at Manchurian Global corporation appear desperate to stop him from finding out.