DVD Keep Your Eyes Open

The footage is made up almost entirely of what appear to be stock shots of extreme sports, including: snowboarding, skiing, BMX, surfing, and motorcross. One athlete from each sport is highlighted (sometimes there are more, but they are pretty inconsistent on this) who then gives a spread out interview intermixed with scenes of them doing what they do.

The movie is a silly short about two skaters who pay a security guard to look the other way while they skate on a college campus. Then when his boss returns the guard and his boss chase the skaters until they end up running them over in their car, killing them, then burying them.

My Comments:
I'm going to reverse the order for my comments about the DVD.

The movie... The short is about the dumbest thing I've ever watched. There are a total of four characters - two skaters and two guards. The skaters say a total of roughly 10 words, all while they are pooling their money to bribe the guard. The rest of the movie they don't say anything, they just skate, and skate, and skate. The guards, on the other hand, can't seem to keep their mouths shut - which works against the movie, sadly, because they sound like two potheads. It's rather obvious that in real life they are probably best friends with skaters and despise security guards. The plot, of course, makes no sense because security guards don't sit at checkpoints on campuses and the majority of the skating is actually just around the city where the movie is filmed instead of on the campus. The plot was just set up for them to have an excuse to film the two skaters. Then, when the skaters are 'killed', it's blatantly obvious that they are mixing footage of dummies with footage of the real skaters - way low budget stuff here. Of course, maybe that was their intent, but it was still just plain silly. In short, the movie portion of this DVD is an absolute waste of film and DVD space. But despite it's problems, it really wasn't that much worse than the rest of the DVD because it was at least coherent and trying to tell a story, despite the horrible acting and plot.

The footage and interviews... This is really where I started to have a major problem with this DVD. Even though there is a director for the DVD, Tamra Davis, I got the impression that most of the footage was likely shot by someone else and she just got her hands on it after the fact then edited it together. So, despite some of the footage being pretty good, I don't think the producers of this DVD deserve any of that credit because I'm pretty sure they didn't do most of the filming.

As for the content, as I noted above, this is not a movie - there is no story here. This is really just an advertising gimmick for extreme sports. There are a bunch of shots of people doing cool things with the occasional wreck. The extent of the story is the brief interludes of some of the athletes telling about their lives, but the snippets are short and lost in the jumble of cuts from the other athletes and their footage.

This leads me to perhaps my biggest problem with this DVD - was there supposed to be an order to it? The interviews and footage don't follow any particular pattern. They start with one person, jump to two or three others, return to the first, then leave that person for 20 or 30 minutes before returning to them. It's almost as if the director and editor just said, "Well, we have this many video clips, let's put them into a randomizer and see what comes out." Et voila, you have Keep Your Eyes Open. This is why I think I ended up concluding that the DVD was really just an advertisement because there was no other way to interpret what took place. Also, keep in mind that interspersed with the footage and interviews are scenes from the actual movie.

Overall, this DVD was more frustrating and annoying than interesting. I never really got anything from it other than watching some cool tricks and feeling like I was watching a 75 minute advertisement for supporting or participating in extreme sports. I guess I should admit that I found two things interesting - Mat Hoffman nearly killed himself when he was attempting to break his own record for height reached on a BMX bike but eventually succeeded, and Travis Pastrana won the first freestyle motorcycle trick contest at 14. Other than those two randomly interspaced interesting tidbits, I was completely bored by this DVD. If you're interested in paying for someone to advertise to you, go ahead and buy it. If you're looking for a movie or just a series of cool extreme sports clips, look elsewhere.