[Spending more time in front of the screen than usual? More YouTubes than tubes? We’ve compiled a half dozen surf flicks you can watch online free while the world has a little collective think about its behaviour, you can find em all here.
Eyeballs hurt? No worries, check out the Lockdown Special episode of our podcast.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja-NLZ3GiJg
Thicker Than Water (2000)
by Jack Johnson & The Malloys
Let’s time travel back to 1999. The Millennium Bug was kind of the Covid-19 of its time, although it wasn’t. Nobody got ill, cash didn’t fly out of ATM’s at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
The Malloys were kind of the Gudangs of their time, and everyone had a fave, and nobody’s was Keith.
Meanwhile, Jack Johnson was little more than a semi-obscure North Shore friend of Slater’s with a scar on his dial.
They collab’d to make, for its time, a fairly ambitious film in TTW, a kind of soothing balm against parts-based action videos in parts of the time, with crew doing not really alley oops on 6’3″ x 17 7/8″ boards, although there is a canny bit of that in TTW, too.
Aside from being an accomplished piece of storytelling, TTW kind of set the tone for what was to come, in a style still being imitated today. As well as some fittingly sweeping, cinematic, moody moments, there are a few classic quotes,
“It was me, Manoa… Noah…” (laugh at them)
“They couldn’t get a roller.” (laugh with them)
“All the attention can take a hike… I’ve had a big taste of it for a while now and it doesn’t fulfil my life” says Slater, with hair, making a uke, which looks like a cry for help. It sure feels lonely, bleak, that contemplative uke making.
I went to a free gig behind the Campbell Bros Bonzer Front store in Haleiwa in 2009 where American musician Todd Hannigan was playing live.
It was free Primo beer, puffs of the Maui Wowee schmoke, good times.
At the end some people I was with were doing nice chatting with Todd so I asked him what surf movie that last song was from because I thought I knew it from somewhere (hadn’t been paying attention to the lyrics).
He looked at me suspiciously. “Thicker Than Water” came his reply.
The song was, after all called, ‘Thicker Than Water’. I felt stupid, but I really couldn’t remember it being in the film, but figured he must know.
This is the first time I’ve watched it through and it ain’t there or in the credits, and it turns out it’s in another film by this mob, Shelter.
So… stick that up your geetar hole and strum it, Hannigan. It was a perfectly reasonable question, after all.
