The Devil's Toy Redux Vancouver
2015 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Corey Adams
Genres: documentary, essay film, sports
Tones: contemplative, provocative
French Fred discusses Corey Adams's feature Machotaildrop as one of the few skate films to critically examine the skate world since Claude Jutra's The Devil's Toy, in a Vancouver remix.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A film about a film about a film—nested critique instead of provocation. It's intellectually sound but plays it safe, content to historicize skate cinema rather than blow it apart.
Adams situates himself deliberately in the lineage of Jutra's foundational work, using the essay-film form to ask what critical examination of skateboarding culture even means in 2015—rigorous archival thinking wrapped in seven minutes.
The choice to filter this through French Fred's voice rather than Adams's own pushes the whole thing into stranger territory; that shift in perspective is what keeps it from being a straightforward homage.