by Marai Rataj

Created on: August 07, 2010

Surfing is a culture, it's about following the ocean waves and chilling on the beach. Surfers take care of the planet, each other and always remember who their friends and family are. Whether hanging ten, or just getting on your feet, you're feeling the ocean, life, and the endless waves connecting us all. Surfing Movies can be broken into three groups: Documentaries on Surfing like The Endless Summer, the 1960's beach party film like Gidget, and features like Blue Crush and Point Break.

For me this movie genre reduces down to one single perfect event. Jack Johnson's 1999 film Thicker Than Water. Johnson's biopic on himself and his childhood friends from the first time they went on a board, to an eighteen month surfing bender through the North Atlantic, South Pacific and Bay of Bengal. Jack's smooth acoustic tunes play melodically over crisp waves, and tropical settings building with help from international fusion sounds grafted from the same locations they surfed. Thicker Than Water is the kind of movie I've been waiting to see for years. It tells the story of the surf, of how the ocean changes you wherever you are and how unforgettable that first ride on a board actually is.

The entire film is a study in surfer culture from the inside, what it means to have nothing but a board, a backpack and a posse of friends to share the waves. Ambient sounds of propellers, waves, people and the world open up the film into the realm of art house firmly above many other tricks-based movies in the genre. Camera angles, and shots reveal an intelligent aesthetic with many of the shots being taken from the waves themselves. When not on the water, Thicker Than Water doesn't lose pace, and much of the effectiveness of the movie is its ability to bring you into the meaning behind their lives. The film switches from colour to black and white with purpose and rhythm, flawless musical choices and the best expressions of what it means to be a surfer.

Thicker Than Water is no Gidget. It's this generation's Endless Summer, it brings the viewer into a surfer's life organically like the tide pulls a boat into the ocean currents. It's one part zen, three parts ocean, and two parts Jack's extraordinary musical presence rolled into waves and moments in time which take you back, and knock you forward.

Blue Crush is perfectly good, with excellent cinematography and a psychological look on getting over bad falls, but when I think of the best surfing movie of all time, nothing does better in my mind than the pure aesthetic and drive of Thicker Than Water.

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