"At first, idleness can seem like a welcome distraction the troublemaking and the fun. Everyone needs some idle time to focus on something other than work. Even if it means focusing on something that's a little bit scary. Stepping back from work is the only way to get perspective."

For nine years millions of people have been spending those idle moments in the company of the cast and characters of Grey's Anatomy. There are worse places one could be.

With films like Sharknado it’s clear that that Hollywood can’t say no to a disaster movie no matter how bad it may sound.  It’s almost as though everyone has given up on the idea that a disaster movie can be good; The Towering Inferno holds up after all these years, yet you can almost guarantee if they attempted to remake it, awfulness would certainly follow.  Heck, the Poseidon Adventure was amazing to watch growing up, and even on the heels of Titanic and with “better” special effects at their fingertips, the remake, Poseidon, was a failure.  What I find all the more odd is that with these straight-to-DVD or SYFY-made movies, the bigger the concept the smaller the budget, leaving it no other route but to fail.

The film jumps into the fray as it opens with Seattle in the grips of a storm that is going to cause a magnitude of destruction.  It’s as though we accidently channel-surfed and fell into the final sequence of Twister till suddenly we flash back to nine hours earlier and things are peachy keen in the beautiful city, home to the Space Needle.

The surf culture and those involved are like a tribe separate from everyone else.  Those who are hardcore into the scene seem to care very little about money or material things, all that seems to matter to this group of outsiders are the onslaught of waves that’ll soon be theirs to ride.  Several movies have been made about the sport/lifestyle, Point Break and Chasing Mavericks are the two that stand out the most for me at this time (not sure if admitting my secret love for Back to the Beach is good idea).  Storm Surfers follows a pair of surf legends, Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones, who were in their glory days in the 80’s but now in their late 40s and early 50s, they are continuing to take their passion the next level, and it seems that will end up being more than 75 kilometers away from shore.

Big wave surfing is not simply a sport to marvel at, but as the documentary shows, a blend of all the right things happening all at the right time, and even still  there is a large amount of risk.  Storms tend to bring in the big waves, so the surfers follow the weather reports to find where the next big system is going to roll through.  It’s in Australia where we get to see the team first attempt to tackle some waves, where the danger they also have to confront is the sharp rocks that line the shore.