Last Paradise isn’t your average surf film. “We’d dream up these crazy ideas of things you can do, which is exciting because you don’t know if you’re going to live or die when you’re doing them,” says all-around extreme sports enthusiast John Neeson.
Exhibit A is 1960s home video footage of him getting dragged on a plywood platform by a galloping horse. The platform has two small handles the rider can use to hold on for dear life. It and many other clips like it make up Last Paradise, screening at the Del Mar on the opening night of the Pacific Rim Film Festival.
The film, narrated and directed by John’s brother Clive, explores the spirit of adventure in the 1960s and 70s. John and Clive Neeson were the sons of two nature videographers who traveled the world and instilled in their kids a conviction that lions, tigers and crashing waves were nothing to fear. John and Clive—along with their friends—went on to be mavericks in New Zealand’s extreme sports world. And they have the footage to prove it.
Last Paradise puts the love of nature, the threat of environmental destruction, the dawning of extreme sports and new scientific breakthroughs (Clive is also a pioneer in ocean wave physics and surf prediction) together in 100 minutes. If the movie sounds a little disjointed, that’s probably because it is.
Still, if there are common threads woven through it, they are the themes of constant change and of nostalgia for lost worlds. In interviews, grinning surfers like John Neeson, now middle-aged, re-visit the early days of extreme sports like wakeboarding, windsurfing and snowboarding. Subjects discuss the developing world’s once vacant, sandy coastlines in places like Bali that now have parking lots and hotel resorts—and 30 or more people fighting for a single wave. What Last Paradise lacks in continuity it makes up for in sheer excitement.
The film showcases the best of downhill gravity addicts doing everything they can for a cheap thrill. Neeson’s friend A.J. Hackett bungee jumps off the Eiffel Tower. Skiing newbies leap off cliffs of fresh powder, tumbling down them as if the goal were not so much landing on one’s feet as not breaking any bones. Viewers watch the dawn of wind surfing with sails suctioned onto surfboards by toilet plungers. And in footage drenched with orange stains of sunlight that are tough to find in the digital age, surfers in short swimming trunks dance up and down surfboards to hang ten. Once surfing’s only trick, hanging ten has now become something of a lost art.
Among those featured in interviews is Seabright’s Pat Farley, who can be seen locally surfing the San Lorenzo rivermouth on days when it’s breaking. The surfing expert with long frizzy blonde locks says he appreciated the film’s fresh faces and one-of-a-kind documentary footage that Neeson had been sitting on. “It’s just a different part of surf history,” says Farley. “It’s not the same old footage and old same guys and blah, blah, blah. It’s a new crew.”
One highlight in the movie is the slow motion video of early wakeboarding. A group of New Zealanders raced a few sheep boats at 70 miles per hour and used them to tug small boards that didn’t have any straps on them and allowed early wakeboarders are able to lean as hard as they wanted into turns. The sport’s pioneers combined the form and flexibility of surfing with a speed normally reserved for the open highway. And they still managed to make turns sharp enough that they basically had to lie down belly-first on the water—with one hand outstretched tightly gripping the rope—in order to complete them.
What shines brightest in Last Paradise are vintage frames of young surfers tearing through ocean curls and peaking around breaking lips on safaris to exotic places—some of which have since been developed to the brink of destruction. Its message about the fragile tenderness of the world’s coastline is an added bonus.
LAST PARADISE screens Friday, Oct. 14 at 7pm and Monday, Oct. 17 at noon at the Del Mar Theatre. Free.
