I mean this as praise: Paved is not all that complicated. It’s a snowboard film filled with 45 minutes of things every snowboarder loves, like big lines on even bigger mountains, massive turns in chest-deep powder, huge airs, and an A-list roster of Burton talent tackling it all. The beauty, of course, is that oftentimes this is all we really want or need from a film, but many projects can’t get out of their own way in order to deliver it. Maybe there’s a self-important message, an obscure theme, and hey, that’s art. So it’s not wrong. But those films don’t always hit the spot when it comes to getting your everyday powder hound excited to ride.
Watch this film and you’ll be excited to get out and ride.
While my first point about the film is that it’s not that complicated, the project itself was anything but small. It was a two-year undertaking with one crew traveling all over the world: Anna Gasser, Ben Ferguson, Brock Crouch, Danny Davis, Mark McMorris, Mikkel Bang, Ylfa Rúnarsdóttir, Zeb Powell, Zoi Synnott, and Takeru Otsuka. You’ll notice the mix of street specialists and backcountry heavy hitters among the roster. They visit Alaska, Hokkaido, Japan, British Columbia, and the Lake Tahoe region in mix-and-match pairings at every stop.
As Burton put it when it started promoting the film, “PAVED blends backcountry riding with the human side of standing sideways.” And the film does a great job of showing the handful of personalities helping them tell that story, but like I mentioned, without going out of its way to tell unnecessary or deep stories when the audience is really just anxious to see somebody toss a backflip. That vibe kicked in for me about 11 minutes into the film when Zeb Powell pulls off one of his trademark, inhuman… things.
“Was that on purpose?” somebody asks.
“Fuck no.”
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