Paul Rodriguez is one of the best skateboarders to have ever stepped onto the griptape. As such, he’s pretty much an authority when it comes to speaking about skating, so it’s no surprise to see him at the centre of new skate film We Are Blood.
But this isn’t your typical skate film. We Are Blood is a high budget, slow-motion-heavy, glossy affair, available in internet shattering 4k – ideal for the computers of the future that will be able to handle that amount of pixel guffing.
There are even slow motion shots of drones getting slow motion shots, which is as dangerous as Googling “Google” or when Ghostbusters cross their streams.
This really is The Art Of Flight on trucks. We were half expecting to see a dude from Teton Gravity Research doing a piece to camera, just like Jeremy Jones has in his high-budget snowboard trilogy Deeper, Higher, and Foxier.“certain people don’t understand the art of skateboarding”
As opposed to being a series of parts by different skaters edited together over a soundtrack of aggressive French hip-hop like a lot of skate flicks we see today, We Are Blood focuses more on the union felt by skaters – the bond shared by everybody that spends their days rolling around, looking for spots.
While all very noble, it kind of makes for a bit of a cliched cheese-a-thon where what should be an amazing skate film (or at least an amazing skate trailer) should be.
Of course, there are the staple slams, just as you’d expect there to be. However, here it’s accompanied with a Rocky-esque triumph-over-adversity voice over. In fact, the trailer is full of quotes that make skateboarding sound as important as curing cancer. “Skateboarding brings people together and overcomes boundaries”
Critics would claim they haven’t heard this much deluded self-reverence since David Hasselhoff claimed the credit for bringing down the Berlin wall, reuniting a divided Germany.
But, for all their moaning, the film is too jam-packed with talent to be anything other than great.
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