Here’s the trailer for Chasing Mavericks, starring Gerard Butler as an old salty surfer dude teaching his young padawan how to surf the mythical waves of Mavericks, a big-wave surf spot in Half Moon Bay that people didn’t really know about until the early nineties. Butler almost drowned shooting the movie, and must have balls like cinder blocks because I’d piss my pants just looking at a Mavericks wave, let alone getting in the water and actually trying to ride one. The other surfers would probably complain about all the crying. (Then again, there’s supposedly a smaller, inside break at Mavericks, which I hope was the one Butler was trying to surf).
Aaaaaanyway. The movie. You know how sometimes a movie’s dialog will sound more like the screenwriter pitching the movie than supposedly real people talking to each other? Yeah, it’s kind of like that.
“Have you ever felt like you were meant for something more?”
“That wave is a myth!”
“This is gonna change everything. -What if you’re wrong? -What if I’m right?”
“There are all kinds of sons, Rusty. Some are born to you. Some just occur to you.”
“This is about more than just surfing. It’s about finding that one thing in life that sets you free.”
Right, because when I think surfers, I think very verbose, I think articulate speakers, coherent, adept at metaphors… “It’s like I searched for the world’s biggest wave, and what I found was even bigger, you know? It’s like, maybe it wasn’t just the waves that were crashing around me, it was my life, you know?”