Review
RIDING GIANTS
Featuring Laird Hamilton, Greg Noll and Jeff Clark
Written and directed by Stacy Peralta
Opens Friday, September 10
Uptown Screen
Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s 2001 doc about early skateboard culture, traced skating’s roots back to a treacherous stretch of beach in Venice, California, where local misfits would surf among the rusty carcasses of amusement park rides. It’s no surprise, then, that Peralta – one of the most successful skateboarders in history – would choose to turn to the ocean for Dogtown’s follow-up.
Riding Giants looks at big-wave surfing, an extreme offshoot of the beach-bum pastime, which sees surfers trying to conquer tsunami-style waves that can measure up to 70 feet in height. Like Dogtown, it’s also a look at the subculture surrounding the activity and an attempt to place surfing within the larger context of American social history.
Peralta focuses on three giants from the sport’s various eras: ’60s icon Greg Noll; Jeff Clark, who surfed Northern California’s Mavericks beach solo for over a decade before introducing it to the surfing world; and current big-wave king Laird Hamilton. Through these figures and their satellite crews of peers and worshippers, Peralta traces a half-century’s worth of technological and iconographic developments, watching as surfing goes from shady fringe activity to cartoonish craze to lucrative commercial sport.
As with Dogtown, the film’s strongest bits come early, as Peralta starts with a cheeky 100-years-of-surfing-in-two-minutes-or-less and works his way up to surfing’s ’60s heyday. Here we get remarkable footage of Noll braving 40-foot waves in Hawaii’s Waimea Bay (like skating, surfing has apparently always been obsessed with documenting its own evolution), and fascinating reflections on surf music and the Gidget phenomenon.
Once we hit the modern era, Peralta falls prey to excessive fawning, piling on the testimonials to hammer home just how great Hamilton – an executive producer on the film – is. Luckily, Peralta’s skilled enough at collage to let his images carry the momentum, delighting in eye-popping slo-mo images and a killer grunge soundtrack.
It’s questionable whether he’s a great filmmaker or just a clever fanboy, but either way, he has an undeniable knack for making his obsessions seem pretty damn gnarly. |
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