Wouldn't It Be Nice
Surfing films and surfing documentaries are a dime a lame baker's dozen, and most of them just find their poorly sketched characters circling the same central theme: the search for some kind of purported "Real", a cliched stoner-zen where life exists in the search for a series of singular moments taking place on a wave, on top a piece of polyurethane foam. A few of these films have been great (Stacey Peralta's "Riding Giants", "Step Into Liquid"), but most are just boring ("The Endless Summer", "Thicker Than Water") and some are absolutely miserable ("In God's Hands", "Blue Crush", "North Shore", and most famously: "Point Break", though I'm sure I've missed plenty). And then there's this guy.
Not ever having surfed, and being a bitter, stubby, mouthy little Jew, I can't say for certain that this kind of enlightened experience doesn't exist. And I'm sure it's fun, too.
But back to mouthy Jews: Surfwise - a new documentary by Doug Pray - follows the story of one fascinating Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, a devout conservative Yid and a Stanford med school graduate in the 1950's. After graduating, Doc moved to Hawaii and became the AMA representative there. For the time, this was already somewhat unorthodox, so it goes without saying that Doc soon abandoned his medical practice, moved to Israel, (supposedly) brought surfing to Haifa and Israel at large, and after being rejected by the IDF as a volunteer, moved back to America. He married his third wife, and had nine kids. And with them, he decided to pursue a dream existence: his reactionary intellectual's utopia, one detached from law, from learning, and supposedly, from restraint. So he made his kids surf. All of them, all the time. And he made them do it while growing up in an RV, away from school, away from society, away from everything but the pursuit of the perfection of the aforementioned moments. It was the socialist summer camp fantasy, and for a while, it worked well. Until it didn't. And Surfwise goes from good to classic when you start seeing the kids' respective lives now, post-utopia, when it starts exploring something that's missing from the populist conversation on any exploration of meaning in things like surfing: what happens when you really, really, really fixate, romanticize, and follow through on the incredibly trivial (like catching a wave) in search of something much greater. It happens more than most people would like to admit.
It opened at the IFC Center on Friday. Go see it.
Surfwise - Official Site
Further reading: The otherwise perennially useless Esquire film "critic" Mike D'Angelo wrote a decent piece about the film.
Not ever having surfed, and being a bitter, stubby, mouthy little Jew, I can't say for certain that this kind of enlightened experience doesn't exist. And I'm sure it's fun, too.
But back to mouthy Jews: Surfwise - a new documentary by Doug Pray - follows the story of one fascinating Dorian "Doc" Paskowitz, a devout conservative Yid and a Stanford med school graduate in the 1950's. After graduating, Doc moved to Hawaii and became the AMA representative there. For the time, this was already somewhat unorthodox, so it goes without saying that Doc soon abandoned his medical practice, moved to Israel, (supposedly) brought surfing to Haifa and Israel at large, and after being rejected by the IDF as a volunteer, moved back to America. He married his third wife, and had nine kids. And with them, he decided to pursue a dream existence: his reactionary intellectual's utopia, one detached from law, from learning, and supposedly, from restraint. So he made his kids surf. All of them, all the time. And he made them do it while growing up in an RV, away from school, away from society, away from everything but the pursuit of the perfection of the aforementioned moments. It was the socialist summer camp fantasy, and for a while, it worked well. Until it didn't. And Surfwise goes from good to classic when you start seeing the kids' respective lives now, post-utopia, when it starts exploring something that's missing from the populist conversation on any exploration of meaning in things like surfing: what happens when you really, really, really fixate, romanticize, and follow through on the incredibly trivial (like catching a wave) in search of something much greater. It happens more than most people would like to admit.
It opened at the IFC Center on Friday. Go see it.
Surfwise - Official Site
Further reading: The otherwise perennially useless Esquire film "critic" Mike D'Angelo wrote a decent piece about the film.
Labels: Fucking Jews, I Promise They'll Get Shorter, It May Not Be Good But At Least It Isn't About That, Socialism, Surfing
