Sherman | Absurd, Radical, Fancy: on Avant-Gnar and the Right Way to Move

More than three years after the Vice article which put them on the map (and almost two years after the next Vice article which let everyone know that, yea, they’re still hanging around somewhere on that map), skateboarding’s least reverent crew, Fancy Lad, released their fourth full-length movie one week ago to much… acclaim? The Fancy Lads are are an amorphous collection of giddily impoverished and moderately talented skate-rats from Boston, whose main schticks include (but God knows are not limited to) inventing vaguely skateboard-related four-wheeled contraptions, not landing their tricks, splicing forgotten VHS clips into their edits, shaky camera-hands and yelling. FL4: The Final Chapter, this most recent opus of theirs, brings all of these “techniques” (and so many more) to a sort of inglorious and completely captivating fixation. The movie’s “frame story” revolves around a bunch of (literal) Craigslist actors at an audition for FL4 itself, where the lines they (poorly) recite are just variations on the Lads’ ad-libs throughout the actual video.