The ocean can kill you in about a million different ways, and no amount of skill can prevent the ocean killing you if it decides it wants to. Just finished it watching it and I want to go surf right now with my buddies who I grew up surfing with!! I just had watched Free Solo and was looking for another documentary when I stumbled upon this.....I have always been a little obsessed with surfing - just the carefree lifestyle. He looks great, in The Drifter, lying around by himself in foreign hotel rooms, staring thoughtfully into mirrors and writing in his journal. I give it two thumps up!! The first comes when Slater has two world titles and is chasing a third, and suddenly finds himself behind Machado in the rankings. © 2020 Paste Media Group. I mean only to say that image-fabrication has become so routine in the surf-flick genre from which Momentum Generation emerges that it becomes impossible to tell if you’re watching fiction or nonfiction, or if it even matters. TWO things that stand out - one BIG time credit goes to Benji's mom, had she not been SUCH a cool mom - this group would have never been formed. Seawater is beautiful. Making a financial contribution to Outside Online only takes a few minutes and will ensure we can continue supplying the trailblazing, informative journalism that readers like you depend on. Everyone who paid attention to surf media in the 1990s will have heard of Momentum, not because it was artfully made—it wasn’t—but because the 1992 film's screechy punk/metal soundtrack and hyper-aggressive slash-and-aerial surfing really did announce the arrival of a new generation of young dudes who shredded waves into way smaller pieces than the reigning old dudes. I don’t mean to say that Momentum Generation is not pleasurable to watch and well made, because it is. No, I don’t have issues. Select the department you want to search in. What I’m saying is, I don’t approach surf movies, documentary or (shudder) otherwise, from a dewy-eyed romantic point of view. Momentum Generation premieres Tuesday, Dec. 11 at 10 p.m. on HBO. Find more newsletters on our newsletter sign-up page. The boys excel at surfing, become friends while rooming together at Weatherly’s home on Oahu, and thus begins a joyous Act Two in which they win contests as the aspiring filmmaker Taylor Steele—of the original Momentum, not Momentum Generation—launches their collective journey toward surf-world fame. The Cinderella Story of the Surfing World, Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2018. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A documentary about a group of talented, driven kids that found their identity, companionship, and success in surfing. Given the esthetic riches and psychic depths you’d think making great surfing programs would be the easiest thing ever, but most of them suck. Thank you. Starting as far back as The Endless Summer, in 1964, surf movies have always been like porn: the action is the point, with a loose little storyline to break the monotony. The simple version goes like this: Momentum Generation is a gorgeously shot feel-good documentary, filled with spectacular surfing footage on waves big and small all over the world, about the lives and friendships of eight male pro surfers and one surf filmmaker who all got to know each other back in the early 1990s, when that surf filmmaker was producing a low-budget surf flick called Momentum. You have issues. So I appreciate the willingness of Momentum Generation to explore darker aspects of this incident. It’s not schmaltzy. [HBO] HD. Momentum Generation is as much a film about competition as it is a film about passion, friends and family. Yes, it takes muscles and trained movement and timing and coordination; yes, it is a physical skill set, like any other sport. At all. To say I don’t is a wild understatement. But perhaps more than any other sport (you can disagree, but if you have ever surfed in choppy water I doubt you would), surfing is about being OK with terror. Amy Glynn is a poet, essayist and fiction writer who really likes that you can multi-task by reviewing television and glasses of Cabernet simultaneously. With Jeannie Chesser, Thomas DeLonge, Shane Dorian, Fletcher Dragge. Many faced hardship and suffered through painful events we (as men) so often shy away from. When: 10 p.m. Tuesday. Surfing is super dangerous. Beaches? Beaches are beautiful, rife with symbolism, profoundly evocative. They come up with the idea of Machado taking a soul-searching solo surf trip across Indonesia, with his hair in the long spectacular curls appropriate to a Central Casting seeker, and call it The Drifter. Awesome movie/documentary brings back so much memories my friends and I growing up and wanting to be like these surfers and an impact they had on my friends and I! I’ve lived a couple miles from Mavericks. This documentary is beyond worth its while to see - it can teach lessons that far exceed face value when approached with an open mind. Porn storylines are almost always fictional—pizza guy, remodel carpenter, office hanky-panky. There is a lot of really stunning footage of a location that entirely justifies the word “iconic,” and importantly, it neither downplays nor glorifies nor sidelines the relationship between this sport and emotional pain. It’s part of that physical skill set, because as most of the Momentums point out over the course of the film, an unchecked adrenaline rush will make you rigid, clumsy, and unable to hold your breath. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. Outside does not accept money for editorial gear reviews. Advertisement. Put another way, the putative documentary called Momentum Generation lets us know (by accident, not because anybody cares) that the putative documentary called The Drifter wasn’t really a documentary at all, and then deploys putatively-documentary footage of clearly staged scenes from The Drifter as if they are real—or, rather, in the same spirit in which that footage was used in The Drifter, which is to say, with absolute comfort in the idea that any line between the real and the fabricated is itself an illusion. Time outside is essential—and we can help you make the most of it. And if you’re wondering how he could really have been alone, given that every one of those scenes has to have been staged and that a film crew was clearly with Machado everywhere he went, well, that’s what I’m trying to talk about. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. You are now subscribed to What You Missed Slater, it turns out, by luring Machado into that high five, and for reasons that have to do with arcane surf contest rules, cost Machado priority for the next wave. This was just a great glimpse into the culture/friendships of this group that made professional surfing what it is today.