, this month鈥檚 20th Century Fox surf drama based on the story of a sweet, doomed big-wave rider named Jay Moriarity, will enter theaters without a ripple of acclaim and kick out a few weeks later with minus-tide earnings.
That鈥檚 one old surf-geezer鈥檚 prediction, anyway.
Hollywood can鈥檛 do surfing. For 50-something years now, beginning with , Tinseltown has muffed it. Overcooked drama. Undercooked characters. Expensive action shots (which, yes, look great on a big screen) stapled to cut-rate scripts. , , , 鈥攅ach one is, at best, a damp approximation of a surfing life.
The problem is, surfing has no hook. You do it鈥攁 lot, obsessively even鈥攁nd in terms of story arc that鈥檚 pretty much it. The whole point is to continue. You rode a huge wave? You won the big contest? Great, a week later you鈥檙e out there like the rest of us trying to scrape together rides, and the week after that, and the next year, ad infinitum.
Hunger drives surfers. The sport has its romantic and exciting moments, but mostly it鈥檚 just base, simple. Hard to get an elevator pitch from that. Making a great movie about surfing should be easier than making a movie about digestion鈥攏ot by much, though.
Chasing Mavericks won鈥檛 move Hollywood any closer to the mark. I didn鈥檛 even have to watch the trailer to figure that out. I just listened to it. The ominous single-wallop bass drum, the cymbal crash, the Top Gun wailing guitar riff.
It鈥檚 the sound of 20th Century Fox trying to frog-march me to an off-the-shelf, PG-rated climax.
Anybody remember ? The animated one with the cute surfing penguins? No joke, that was the one time Hollywood got it right. Don鈥檛 take the sport so seriously, in other words. More penguins, less drama.
Matt Warshaw is the author of .