Eastern Giants

[I suppose I should say there's spoilers below, in the sense that I reveal plot points. But we're talking about Cronenberg here. And you can't spoil vinegar.]

Everyone who knows me knows how much I dislike David Cronenberg, so much so that I'm not even going to check if that's the proper spelling of his name. Granted, I've only seen a very, very few of his movies, but one that I did see was the infamous Spider. (Yes, Brent. I forgive you.) To call Spider a movie is somewhat misleading, however. It could be more accurately described as an unwatchable trainwreck of pretentious, self-indulgent schlock. I spent most of the film wishing desperately that I was somewhere, anywhere else. Had you dropped me in downtown Camden at night, I'd still have been grateful. Sure, I'd have been dead soon, but at least I'd have got to watch something happen – even if that something was my own rape and murder.

Anyhoo. Nico doesn't hate Cronenberg, and he really, really wanted to see Eastern Promises because his secret girlfriend is in it (Naomi Watts, that is, not Viggo Mortenson). So I went. Brownie points for me. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that the Ritz here in Philly sells swedish fish by the pound. It's glorious, and it eases the pain of Cronenberg.

Right. The movie is about a hot yet naïve midwife in a London hospital who, upon delivering a baby of a VERY young Russian mother (who then dies), tries to trace the mother's past so that the baby can go to its family. The means of doing this is the young mother's diary, written in Russian, which Watts snitches from her purse after she dies. Watts, who despite being kinda-sorta Russian (and having a Russian-speaking uncle living with her), decides to ask a complete stranger (one with 'menacing' scrawled on his forehead) to translate the photocopied diary for her. Obviously, the diary contains a Big Secret. So bad guys spend quite a lot of time threatening the baby and trying to get the diary from Watts. Oh, and some people are Not Who They Appear to Be. And no one in the film notices the Xerox-shaped plot hole. And Viggo wears sunglasses at night.

Eastern Promises is not as bad as Spider. That is not to say that it is good. It's not. What it is, is blah. For a movie described as a "thriller," EP fails to deliver. The plot points are so predictable they might as well have been written at the bottom of the screen. Nothing happened which was in the least suspenseful, or surprising. With the exception of the set-up, nothing is even really tragic. The twist can been seen a mile away. All the plot points (except the Xerox one) are tied up quite tidily at the end of the film, and the implication is that all the characters will continue on, with little need to remember this bit of their lives. Sort of like Six Characters in Search of an Author, except it's Six Characters Who Will Deign to Let the Author Use Them for Two Hours, as Long as He Doesn't Mess Anything Up and It's Understood That He Doesn't Think This Is A Date, Green?

So. Not eye-piercingly awful, but certainly not the best use of your ten bucks. Should you be in the market for home-viewing, you may come across another piece of slight self-indulgence: Riding Giants, a documentary about Big Wave Surfing. Not just surfing, mind. Big Wave Surfing.

RG starts well, with a breezy yet informative history of surfing, which I certainly didn't really know about before. There's plenty about the beginning of the surfing counter-culture in the 50s, and much about the personalities of the few dozen men (and it was virtually all men) who learned/invented/discovered big wave surfing, which is to say how to surf waves that are twenty-plus feet high. In practice, that meant the waves at a couple of points in Hawaii, and the insular culture that surrounded that area is really fascinating to hear about, especially because the guys who were involved are still alive, so it's oral history at its best. This is a tiny group of people who tested their own personal limits, physically and mentally, to do something that had never been done before. Cool.

The movie speeds through the late sixties and seventies to get to Northern California, where a surfer kid found another point where there were surfable big waves (the first place in the continental US). This kid surfed it virtually alone for years until he managed to convince his friends and the larger BWS community that this place (Mavericks) was legitimate. That bit is also a great story.

Speed up again to the 21st century, where enters our bit of indulgence: Laird Hamilton (who executive produced). Hamilton is (apparently) the Greatest Surfer Alive. I know this because everyone in the documentary he executive produced said so. Also, I remember him in an AMEX commercial. Hamilton found even bigger Big Waves than those in Hawaii or NoCal, in Tahiti. Using a newly-developed method called tow-in surfing, he was able to catch the biggest wave any surfer has ridden in history. Good for him.

Yet, despite all the truly amazing footage of this dude surfing those crystal blue wall o' waters, I was strangely put off by the assertion that this represented the pinnacle of Big Wave surfing. You'll have to watch the whole thing to really see what I'm talking about, but the shift in understanding of what it means to be an athlete AND what it means to be a Big Wave surfer underlies the whole movie (unintentionally, I'm sure). We start with this intrepid group of guys who cast off the prevailing culture and ideals of post-war America to live on a beach in Hawaii, where they have little more than their own bodies and brains to accomplish what has never been done before just for the sake of doing it. We end with a multi-million dollar sporting industry, where surfers can (and do) make use of every technological advance in surfboards (from materials to design), use a support team of jet-ski drivers who are essential in 'catching' the big wave, and they are --in every sense -- professional athletes.

The achievements of these two groups are not comparable. I don't even mean this in a Hank Aaron/Barry Bonds kind of way (that's a different story entirely). I mean that the world, and humanity's conception of what it means to be athlete, has shifted almost 180 degrees in the last half century. Riding Giants (perhaps Riding on the Shoulders of Giants was too long a title) is significant for that reason alone.

One other reason to watch Riding Giants: you will get to hear people use the word "gnarly" as a purely technical descriptor, and that's worth hearing.