SURF'S UP!

REVIEWED - RIDING GIANTS: 'They were like the bikers or the beats, only these guys were having fun," someone says during Stacy Peralta's exhilarating documentary following the attempts by three generations of surfers to conquer the world's largest waves. It is a real pleasure to revel in the romance and casual optimism of this strange - politically rather conservative - subculture that grew up along the beaches of southern California in the mid 1950s, Donald Clarke.

The first movement of big-wave chasers, behaving like the hippies to come, but without their pre-millennial self-importance, set up their own tiny community in Waimea Bay, Hawaii. There, in between picking pineapples and spearing fish, they flung themselves daily at preposterously huge walls of surf.

Featuring funny, unpretentious comments from the surviving surfers - most notably, that era's great hero, the bullet-headed Greg Noll - and a low-key narration from Peralta himself, Riding Giants winningly recreates a brief golden moment before commercialism (and Gidget) took over. It is rather like being shown around CBGBs before Blondie had their first hit.

In contrast, the final section of the picture deals with big-wave surfing as a modern, extreme (or do I mean Xtreme?) sport. Towed into position by jet-skis, squatting on lozenge-shaped planks the size of snowboards, the current master, one Laird Hamilton, zips up and down angry behemoths with insane grace. He is fantastically brave and prodigiously talented, but the poetry of the pioneers' raw individualism seems to have vanished.

Mind you, Peralta does not appear to have intended his last act as a hymn to a lost anything. Unlike Dogtown and Z-Boys, his even stronger skateboarding documentary, Riding Giants maintains a positive, celebratory tone throughout. Clattering with terrific songs and spectacular action footage, the film works perfectly well as a sheer burst of uncomplicated energy. However, should you be in search of poignancy, then it is here too.