Grind

Think Blue Crush without water--or awesome surfing footage, likable characters with real personalities, beautiful girls in bikinis, or anything else worth watching--and I guarantee whatever you have in mind is better than Grind. A skateboarding road-trip flick that will bore real skateboarders silly (and I should know--I've been one for 25 years), it includes barely 10 minutes of badly-edited actual boarding, less than half of which features the main characters (mostly no-name actors using obvious stunt doubles), who in the course of the movie perform only one trick (at the very end) that's beyond the abilities of any dedicated junior high school kid with a modicum of talent. The balance of the movie follows four witless, college-age pro-tour wannabes around the country as they stalk and try to hassle the current king of sponsored skateboarding (Jason London) into looking at a videotape of their supposedly fancy footwork. You want a cool skateboarding movie? Try 2002's exhilarating, cinematically creative documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys--about the birth of skate culture in the '70s--which has more thrills and personality in any 30 seconds than you'll find in this entire movie. Not recommended. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by director Casey La Scala, writer Ralph Sall, and costars Vince Vieluf, Adam Brody, Mike Vogel, and Joey Kern; the music video “Too Bad About Your Girl” by The Donnas; and a trailer. Bottom line: a lite extras package for a lite film.] (R. Blackwelder)