Riding Giants (Special Edition)

NATURE AT ITS BEST THIS DOCUMENTARY IS FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY. EVEN PEOPLE THAT DONT SURF ENJOY THIS FILM. THESE GUYS ARE PART OF ONE OF NATURES GREATEST EVENTS.

This is the most impressive movie about surf, focused on giant waves. It shows the sport on the historical prospective supported by excellent remarks made by alive surfer legends.
I strongly recommend this movie for whoever like sports in general. I am not a surfer and loved it.

This is the ultimate film about surfing. Take a great director coming off the huge success of his last film about stateboarding, a very good script, the most interesting characters in the history of surfing, incredible footage of BIG waves and you have all the ingredients for the best movie ever made about surfing!

"This is the sea" -by Waterboys & Mike Scott

These things you keep
you better throw them away
turn your back
on your soulless days
once you were tethered
now you are free
once you were tethered
now you are free

that was the river
this is the sea
if you're feelin' weary
or you been alone too long
or maybe you been sufferin' from
a few too many
plans that have gone wrong
and you're tryin' to remember
how fine your life used to be
runnin' around banging your drum
like it's 1973

well that was the river
this is the sea
now you say you got trouble
you say you got pain
you say you got nothin' left to believe in
nothin' to hold on to
nothin' but chains
you been scourin' your conscience
and rakin' through your memories
you been scourin' your conscience
and rakin' through your memories

but that was the river
this is the sea
Now I can see you wavering
as you try to decide
you got a war in your head
and it's tearin' you up inside
you're tryin' to make sense
of something that you just don't see
you're tryin' to make sense now
and you know that you once held the key


but that was the river...
this is the sea
Now I hear there's a train
it's comin' down the line
it's yours if you hurry
you got still enough time
you don't need no ticket
and you don't pay no fee
you don't need no ticket
and you don't pay no fee
that was the river
this is the sea

["I don't wanna....not live....because of something that MIGHT happen..." --Laird Hamilton ]

The reality of Big Wave Surfing, is about living without fear. To hell with death. To hell with the fear of what might happen. This is about LIVING. All the song lyrics repeat this message over and over. The deeply spiritual message of RIDING GIANTS, is that the fear of death should not limit living, whether in play or work. Thus, the Chinese Proverb, saying "HE-WHO-FEARS-DEATH-DIES-A-THOUSAND-TIMES" comes to its culmination it big wave surfing. The SUN, WAVES, WIND, and being fully alive in the moment.....good grief. LET GO! This is Zen Buddhism, martial arts, Messianic fervor, Buckaroo Bonzai, and Larry-The-Cable-Guy... all in a package, SHAKIN' STONES!

I am so pleased that "This is the sea" is the very first music on the CD, as it was the epitome of the documentary's music and statement. Mike Scott authored the lyrics with which "Riding Giants" is reprised. It sums up and affirms the comments by big wave surfer Dr. Rennekker in this powerful documentary, stating that big wave surfing is about TRANSFORMATION.

I've seen Riding Giants over 22 times in the past three months, having ordered my own copy for deeper study several weeks ago. I was deeply impressed by the featured surfers, and also by magazine editor Sam George's comments about big wave surfing being a kind of faith.

The powerful combination of lyrics to "This is the sea" with the views of magazine editor Sam George & Dr. Renneker, have a strong effect. As Dr. Rennekker says it;

"It's about eliminating the B*S*."

I'm not a big wave surfer, nor ever will be. I'm a chess player, another sub-culture, which like surfing, is said to sometimes be addictive. There are "waves" in chess also. Great big ones, when you are "in the moment, " balancing on a wave of energy and feeling, excluding all else, and you see a leverage move, and in the silent exuberance of your mind, focused entirely on the wavelike motion of little pieces on the the board, you say; "OH, MY GOD!" Such a moment is depicted in "Riding Giants" in regards to the killer wave ridden off the coast of Tahiti by Laird Hamilton in 2000. Big Wave Surfing is about a kind of mastery, about "letting go". This is not about the river. "This is the SEA, yeah...."

A recurring theme in Life, is that people are searching; searching for some kind of "connected" feeling. The sea is as deep a connection as can be found in the things of the earth. For this we sail, we swim, we leave home and go on "adventures".

This is as powerful a documentary as I have ever seen. The span of time covered, all of the 20th Century and a little before, lends to the docummentary the air of a cultural phenomenon. Powerful, as much for what was not shown, as for the featured film clips of surfers. All the events of world history are a mere blur in the background. In the words of Mike Scott...that world is "...the river. THIS IS THE SEA, yeah!", eternal, because this is about men and women on a board, with only a swim suit and courage. It's about the moment. It's the antithesis of our industrialized, mass educated, media-driven culture, riding glorious mechanization into the New Jerusalem, fearful that something might happen. The waves are free.

The soundtrack is incredible. The soundtrack, the personalities, the phenomenon of personal transformation, the phenomenon of surfing itself, make this a documentary that will endure for decades. This is not about paddling out to catch 5 foot waves along some sunny Southern California coastline. This is about GIANT waves in excess of 20', perhaps as high as a hundred feet, that ....in the words of a young woman big wave surfer, ..." ...you have to just KNOW you're going to make it."

It is not suggested that these unique individuals have done something for mankind; but what they have found for themselves is something that all of us can discover. This is the Sea. Yeah.

There's a Boys Club camaraderie to Riding Giants, kind of like watching much cooler versions of U.S. Senators putting aside all their ideologicial and personality differences to make a windy documentary on how great it is to be one big happy club under the Capitol Dome. Or, put another way, there's a lot of the old SNL gag, "I'm Chevy Chase...and you're not," in Riding Giants. If you can get past that thick aura of cool guy -- and it is nearly all guy -- self-congratulation, the film has many, many sequences of amazing surfing (through waves that are in many ways the stars of the movie) that make the case for the sport's danger, beauty, and spiritual appeal far better than any of the surfers' comments. Three exceptions to that general rule -- the description of recovering the body of Mark Foo, and, over the credits, the rhetorical question of whether if someone were seeking an ultimate religious experience would people call him a "religious bum" and Greg Noll's thinking that Waimea winked at him recently as he watched the third or fourth new generation in the waves that he had first ridden.