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Whereas some may see skateboarders as merely vandals and hooligans, I see them as performance artists, athletes and guides. Their performances work from dance in how they move their bodies and from music in how they manipulate their boards in ways that arouse percussive slaps, clicks, clacks, grinds, and carves upon the metal and concrete that makes a city. They are athletes in how they exploit, to create a word working off Pierre Bourdieu's use of "social capital", their kinesthetic capital, that is, the physical resources afforded them by their youthful bodies. From our teenage years to our twenties, our bodies allow for greater physical creativity since we possess greater energy and flexibility. Also, our bodies during this age span are better able to recover from injuries that at times result from such exploits. And skateboarders are guides in how they "read" cities. As Iain Borden illuminates in his wonderful book, a book I'd been wanting someone to write for years, Skateboarding, Space and The City: Architecture and the Body, skateboarders interact with a city and its structures differently than the rest of us. They reinterpret and reclaim spaces forgotten or ignored, they re-familiarize us with spaces so ubiquitous that we've blocked them out of our minds until skateboarders thrust these spaces back into our consciousness, and they revision what uses spaces encourage. They approach modern architecture ". . . unconcerned with architecture's historical purposes" (105). They are not interested in the entire structure, but pieces of it. They do not exploit the buildings as they were initially devised, as mazes to direct us through our day. Instead, they exploit the textures of a space. "This focus on texture gives skaters a different kind of knowledge about architecture, one derived from an experience of surfaces and material tactility" (194). Since skateboarders read a city through their bodies acting upon the city, they can help us read our cities differently if we'd only bother to learn from them like Borden has.

In-line skaters of The Aggressives variety can read cities similarly to skateboarders. And this is what I was hoping for from Jeong Jae-eun's second feature. In her masterful debut, Take Care of My Cat, Jeong brought us into the lives of five girls as they crossed into womanhood while negotiating a space for themselves within the opportunities and constraints available to them as young, Korean women in their city of Inchon. Along the way, Jeong provided us with many other fascinating observations, particularly how these young woman utilized technology in their relationships. Since in-line skating is also a technology, I was expecting a similar narrative use of this mechanical technology as Jeong afforded the computerized technology of cell-phones. Sadly, what I found instead were moments of promise that were never fully mapped out, nor as expertly intersecting, as they were in her debut.

The Aggressives mainly follows the life of Chun Soyo (Cheon Jeong-myeong - R U Ready?), a "loner" who is alone in not thinking he's alone, and his new found friends, a group of in-line skaters. This crew includes a stock group of characters, the lothario, the comedian, etc., along with three other characters whose lives are a little more developed in the narrative. Gabba (Lee Cheon-hee - Ice Rain, A Good Lawyer's Wife) is the father figure of the crew and works at an in-line skating park. Mogi (Kim Kang-woo - Silmido, Springtime), which is Korean for "mosquito", is the rebel who just wants to skate for fun. For those who have seen Stacy Peralta's documentary about the second-wave of skateboarding, Dogtown and Z-Boys (2002), and the fiction feature that spawned from it, Lords of Dogtown (Catherine Hardwicke, 2005), Mogi would be comparable to the skateboarding legend Jay Adams. Mogi is held in similar high esteem concerning his skills, and similar low esteem when his I-don't-give-a-f*** attitude becomes intolerable. Soyo is positioned in between the father figure and the rebel during a scene where the two other characters have a fight. Soyo will mimic the style and attitude of each of these characters in front of a mirror in the next scene, underscoring the over-arching theme of the film: that we might fall a thousand times as we try to find the ways and means to our success. As there must be a love interest for whom these characters can also fall, (but, thankfully, this is not your typical portrayal of a teen movie love interest), we also have Han-joo (Jo Yi-jin). She aspires to direct an in-line skating video, so she follows these boys with camera in hands and skates on feet, just like Spike Jonze did before he got into John Malkovich's head.

Although aspects of this subculture are touched on, the artistry and the style (which are filmed very well), the skating for fun and identity, the battles with police and the public, etc., just as there are too many characters to juggle, there are too many themes that aren't molded into a coherent whole. Yes, one could argue that, since in-line skaters experience the city through bricolage, what Eithne Quinn explains in her book Nuthin' But a "G" Thing: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap as when ". . . individuals improvise responses to their environment, to what they have nearest at hand" (53), what seems incoherent is actually in sync with the subculture's aesthetics. But that, similar to what I wrote about the inferior film Looking for Bruce Lee (Kang Lone, 2002), would seem too much like rationalizing a greater significance out of this film than is justified. And although the sound design is exquisite when the skates meet the concrete, in stark contrast to Take Care of My Cat, the soundtrack is pretty lame compared to the former film's lush, perfectly syncopated, cell-phone-like melodies. In the end, like skaters to a city, I can take bits of enjoyment from pieces of this film, but Jeong doesn't seem to have taken care of this film as well as she did her debut. Still, she's entitled to hundreds more falls since she already found artistic success with her very first effort.      (Adam Hartzell)

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