The Times on the wrong side of history again!
It is impossible for mainstream media, and none are as
mainstream as the New York Times, a race-obsessed left-tilting
newspaper that swings between parody and
propaganda, to write about surfing without
some sorta nod to 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont
High.
The Times’ film critic Glenn Kenny, whose review of Vaughan
Blakey and Nick Pollet’s dollys-with-cocks animated film The
Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, which opens in US cinemas
tomoz, doesn’t waste a single second, leading with:
Jeff Spicoli, the surfing-obsessed truant portrayed
memorably by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982),
may have been an airhead, but he had a vocabulary. Things he
enjoyed were “gnarly” or “humongous.”
Later in the huffy review,
The dolls — with minimally articulated limbs — are
made to embody Fanning and a few other real-life surf
stars.
These figures (the animation makes the puppetry of Trey
Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” look like
“Fantastic Mr. Fox”) enact an asinine story of how a vaccine
eradicated all memory of surfing, and a mission to bring the
activity back. The line “Ten years ago a sport existed, it was
called surfing, and you dominated it” — emphasized with an
expletive — is repeated more times than anyone would be amused to
hear it.
And wraps with,
The climax of the movie features the dolls, many of them with
faces smeared with brown goo, fighting each other with sex toys.
After this, it looks as if a longer segment of surfing is in store.
One’s relief then is palpable. But brief. The doll nonsense soon
resumes, and then, mercifully, come the end credits.
The premise for the film, as you know, is beautiful: It is ten
years in the future and a virus has hit and John Fig, played by
Vaughan, has made a vaccine to save everyone but the vax wipes out
everyone’s memory of surfing.
“Mick’s a yogi meditation guru bogan. Griff is a hyped-up guy
stuck in the desert who hasn’t seen anyone in years, Wilko is a
cowboy, Ando is a ninja, Mason is a volcano tour guide in Hawaii
and Jack’s trying to be a rock star but he’s real bad,” says
director Nick Pollet.
The idea for the dolls came from Mick Fanning’s retirement
dinner when each guest was gifted a bobble-headed Mick.
“It was on my desk and I was tinkering around and I ripped the
head off it, grabbed a Superman doll from my kid, ripped the head
off that and put Mick’s head on it. Then I started mucking around
with a green screen,” says Pollet.
For three hundred dollars each, and after much to and froing
with a factory in China, Nick had reasonable facsimiles of the
cast, including the WSL commentators Ronnie Blakey, who is also
Vaughan’s brother, and Joe Turpel, and surfers Mick Fanning, Mason
Ho, Griffin Colapinto, Jack Freestone, Matt Wilkinson and Craig
Anderson.
Vaughan Blakey was thrilled by the review in the New York Times
telling BeachGrit,
“I never in my wildest dreams thought the military industrial
complex-sympathising war propagandists and socials elites at the
New York Times would run a critical eye over our ninety-minute
surfy dick, balls and fart joke! I am thrilled to bits!”
He qualifies the thrill.
“The bit that says we’re no Spicoli kinda hurts but I guess I
can cop that. Having fun is not for everyone.”
It isn’t the first time the Times has been on the wrong side of
history.
Over the course of World War II the Times shunted stories about
Nazi death camps into the back pages, its Jewish owner, the
anti-Zionist Arty Sulzberger believing European Jews were
“responsible for their own demise in the Holocaust.”
Lately, editorialising around the Duke University lacrosse case
and the furore over historical inaccuracies in the 1619 Project has
dulled the titan’s once untarnishable rep to the dullest
sheen.
