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.
