YWS Video Review: Sus Monts

After relaxing and rejuvenating long weekend ending in a giant turkey feast, I am going to dedicate this week's posts to taking care of a some unfinished business in the form of a bunch of video reviews that I've been meaning to do.

The first of these reviews is for the Calgary-based video Sus Monts, which features a long time friend of mine as well as one of my all time favourite skaters, Kevin Lowry.

As mentioned, Sus-Monts is a video made by Calgary residents Jon Sherman and Mark Webber, featuring mostly fellow Calgary residents as the skaters but also a few Canadian big wigs such as Lee Yankou and Antoine Asselin. The fact that the video hails from Calgary explains the title of the video which in horrendous Calgary-slang is short for "suspect montages." I'm assuming that the reason they used this title is because the whole video is arranged as one long montage. And although some other videos have sort of pulled this idea off before, Sus Monts departs from other videos in the fact that there's no real intros to anyone's section and for that matter there aren't even titles announcing someone's section is starting.

I'm definitely into the feel of this video as a departure from all of the over-produced big blockbuster hits out there hitting the skateboard world lately. I've always wondered why it is that big companies feel the need to turn their skate videos into complete and utter pieces of shit, when people almost universally agree that their favourite videos are the older ones before the usage of slow-motion, digital effects, dolly shots, etc. etc. I honestly think that the bigger companies fall into some sort of Hollywood syndrome where they think "Oh fuck, we have an epic team, we better make the video epic!" Fully Flared, Mind Field, The Flip Video (review coming this week) are all so over done that what we get out of a skate video is Transformers 2 when all we want to see is Cool Hand Luke. But it's good to know that there are filmmakers out there doing it properly such as 2008 Soonie award winner for video of the year, Lo-Def, and now Sus Monts carries on this tradition nicely. I'd try to make some sort of comment about how independent Canadian filmmakers do a much better job than the big-name filmmakers in the States, but my argument would really be thrown off by Strange Brew, which was another Hollywood wannabe pile of steaming crap. But then again we also have Ryan McGuigan's videos like Supper's Ready which sort of defy all my arguments because they are pretty heavy with effects and editing, but are consistently fucking awesome. Better just leave this all for another post...

The point I'm getting at is lots of the time, the little independent guys out there "get it" way more than the big time company guys, and Sus Monts is a good example of this. Obviously I am going to dote over Kevin's section as he is a YWS favourite, but I'm also really stoked on Drew's section. Despite Lee Yankou's fondness for YWS unapproved denim colour choices, his section is really sick and he shows why he is getting a lot of American attention. Speaking of American attention, Antoine Asselin's section is super good too, despite the fact that Antoine himself apparently hated it and sabotaged the Montreal premiere because of it. (Actually it seems as there was a lot of drama surrounding this video as Ben Stewart apparently doesn't even really skate anymore since filming for this video burnt him out?) However, whether there was any drama over his section or not, in my opinion Antoine's section is sick and it proves why he's getting his shit direct from DLX these days.

Of course being the ultra-critical skate nerd that I am, I'm not going to act like it's a perfect video. Even though the video was slimmed down to almost the bare essentials, I still felt there was a little too much artsy fartsy shots, and if the feeling you're going for is a streamlined, no bullshit skate video, they definitely could have gotten rid of some of that bullshit. It's been seen a million times in every video, why put it in another? Another thing that sort of irked me is that some of the skaters have footage not only in their individual sections, but also sprinkled throughout some of the "suspect montages". I found this really annoying as some of the dispersed footage was a lot better than some of the footage that made it into their sections, such as this ollie of Kevin's which I thought was one of his best tricks in the entire video:

On top of that I found the cover of the video, as well as the corresponding footage completely fucking disgusting. I actually have to keep this DVD on my shelf with the front cover facing down because I hate looking at it so much. But maybe I'm the only one who is opposed to looking at pictures of real-life versions of Sloth from the Goonies.

But even with the gross cover, this is still a great video that I highly recommend buying. That's right buying, not downloading. This is a good opportunity to reward the little guy doing it right who could really use the money, so I highly recommend buying it rather than downloading it. Hell, I bought it, and I'm pretty sure I could have gotten one for free, so you should too. At the very least it's worth owning for the footage of Kevin blasting a fucking car:

So if you want a copy of this video and they don't have it at your local shop, you can buy it directly from Paypal by following this link, and if you are a shop that wants to carry this video, but don't have distribution for it, you can contact Kevin at kevinnoellowry@gmail.com. YWS approved!