FINALLY, A MOVIE THAT MATTERS
Many have tried, most have failed. It's harder to make a surfing movie than it looks. But today I viewed on the big screen one of the finest examples of the genre ever created, the new history of big wave surfing, Riding Giants.
The early surf movies were disastrously bad - type "Frankie and Annette" and "surfing movie" into Google, and Microsoft Explorer uninstalls itself. That bad.
You didn't really get good surfing movies until Bruce Brown showed up with The Endless Summer films (1966 and 1994). Those movies were good because they showed good surfers surfing in interesting places, but they were light.
Brown's movies did have one thing in common with "Beach Blanket Bingo" - no big surf. You can only watch so much of this before you start hunting around for the newspaper.
Riding Giants traces the story of the other guys - the guys who were "surfing while other people were evacuating" - the big wave surfers. Guys like Greg Noll, the first man to surf Waiamea, and who, at Makaha, surfed a wave considered the largest ever attempted up to that time (1969 - the same year Ray Genet did his first winter ascent of McKinley; and, oh yes, man walked on the moon).
The movie introduces you to Jeff Clark of Half Moon Bay, who discovered the break at Mavericks in the mid-70's and surfed it alone, every day, for 15 years, before finally convincing a couple of other guys to try it. Now Mavericks is a legend in big wave surfing and all the great surfers are there when it's going off. Bizarre that it took so long - someone in the movie likens it to discovering Everest back behind Mt. Whitney.
And you get to meet the inimitable, incomparable, inconceivable Laird Hamilton, of whom I have blogged before.
See the damn movie. Every kid in America should have their Britney/Justin/J. Lo crap taken away, their bling-bling confiscated, their face slapped, and be required to watch this film. Then this could be a great nation again.
It is a sad commentary that neither political party has the will to do this.
And the soundtrack rules, too.
posted by Anonymous at 4:57 PM
2 Comments:
Just so nothing catches you by surprise: a neighbor of mine writes stage and screen plays; I told her I had a friend who was a mountain climbing and surfing enthusiest who never climbs mountains or goes surfing. She said this was the funniest thing she's ever heard.
Actually, your vantage point from which you observe surfing and mountain climbing gives you a completly free and unbiased viewpoint, unfettered by actual experience.
In the same veign, I am an expert at deep sea nitrogen diving and high altitude ballooning, all from the comfort of my own couch, though i did sleep at a Holiday Inn last night.
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