Eyeballs pop, jaws crack!

In this short film, which was made by the Newport photographer Tom Carey, and who is now King of Content at What Youth, we get to tap our toes to Jack Freestone bumping, crouching and jumping at BSR cable park.

Oh that name do ring a bell don’t it.

Just over a month ago, a New Jersey surfer died of a brain-eating amoeba after visiting the park. The Centers for Disease control and Health Department tested the facility and while not finding any Naegleria fowleri, the responsible villain, concluded that, “epidemiologic and environmental assessment indicate that exposure likely occurred at this (Waco) facility.”

In a Trumpian response, the pool’s owner loosed a press release that was headlined, “BSR SURF RESORT, Lazy River & Royal Flush slide WATER TESTS COME BACK CLEAN” and “BSR Determined to Go the Extra Mile, Set Highest Standards for Safety.”

The pool is closed now, til March 2019, so let’s make a little hay with what sunshine remains.

Two surfers, one retired, the other a recluse, reappear in four-minute short for deck-grip sponsor…

You could say that age, and disinterest, has not wearied the retired Taj Burrow and the reclusive Craig Anderson.

Both men, one forty, the other just-turned thirty, have long waved the digitus medius at pro surfing, at the game etc and yet, here, we are reminded why we loved them so.

Taj Burrow was, and still is, an amalgam of Griffin Colapinto and Filipe Toledo while Craig Anderson is still unlike anything we’ve seen before or since – a nice-looking person in butch poses.

The action starts one-minute in (Do you like scenics and raindrops? Start at the beginning) and there’s a surfeit of slow-motion, something which eats me alive.

But I’ve never been a patient man.

John John's best movie part?

That golden period. All collaborative artists have ’em. It’s only years later, upon reflection, that we can trawl through their work and call it. Kai Neville is a 36-year-old filmmaker who owned the performance surf film space from his 2010 debut Modern Collective all the way through to his magnum opus, 2015’s Cluster.

But for Kai, it was his second film, Lost Atlas, made in 2011 and shot entirely on his little Canon 7D, that built his reputation into a profitable exercise (Red Bull used Kai for Jordy Smith’s bio movie Bending Colours).

Seven years later, it’s still his masterwork. It came at a time when he had John John Florence, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Dane Reynolds in his pocket and more than eager to nail clips.

Until Lost Atlas, the world only had a shadowy idea of how good eighteen-year-old John John was.

Kai showed us.

This section was the close to Lost Atlas. It was filmed on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, and typical of Kai’s ruthless editing, comes in at under three-minutes.

No slow-mo, no fades, no motion graphics.

Just a face-full of ultra-hard surf candy and, I’d posit, John John’s best-ever movie part.