"Riding Giants" is an ambitious and entertaining film which could probably be enjoyed by someone who had never even heard of surfing. By the end of it, they would be able to ace a written exam on the sport, its ancient history, its rediscovery in the mid-20th century, the spread of surfing as a culture, its explosive growth after the release of the Hollywood movie, "Gidget," biographical sketches of the founding fathers — with special emphasis on those who led their tribe to mount and ride the very scary "big waves" (50-70 feet) of Hawaii, Northern California, and the South Pacific.

The focus of the movie, thus, is not so much the surf or the surfing as the surfers. So, the only group which may not be completely enthralled with "Riding Giants" is that of those exclusive surfers who may feel that any footage not devoted to the waves is footage wasted. But even most surfers will, I think, be thrilled to make the acquaintance of such larger-than-life characters as Greg "the Bull" Noll, who pioneered the riding of Hawaii’s giant waves in the late 1950s, Jeff Clark, who discovered the huge breakers of Maverick’s north of San Francisco (and surfed them alone for ten years before he could convince anybody else to try them), and the god-like Laird Hamilton — GQ-handsome, aggressive, and fearless — whom everyone else in the movie hails as the greatest living surfer and possibly the greatest surfer who ever lived.

Director Stacy Peralta ("Dogtown and Z-Boys") — of the Powell-Peralta skateboarding dynasty — has said of his movie: "My primary reason for making ‘Riding Giants’ is that I simply wanted to see a film like this." This is, in my opinion, the most perfect statement an artist could make of his motive for creating a work of art (and I believe that "Riding Giants" is a work of art). It comes hauntingly close to repeating the advice on writing given by Seymour Glass to his brother Buddy in J. D. Salinger’s "Seymour: an Introduction": " … sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself."

That is obviously a version of what Peralta did, and it shows in every luminous frame of "Riding Giants." The surfing scenes are exhilarating and the socio-cultural context is fascinating, but this wonderful movie is character-driven, and it is totally unique.

Courtesy photo

Caption: Big-wave surfing’s two-man Pantheon: Greg Noll (left) and Laird Hamilton, at the time of "Riding Giants."