Weird Wednesdays: Surfer, Dude

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

There was a bit of buildup to the Weird Wednesday screening of Surfer, Dude. Ziah Grace, who introduced the film alongside Morgan Hyde, had spent the last two Mays taking on a month-long viewing challenge he calls McConnaugheMay. Every day of May, he committed to watching a movie with Matthew McConnaughemay in it and chronicled his slow descent into self-inflicted madness on his Letterboxd account.

At the beginning of year two of the challenge, Ziah invited anyone brave enough to join him. I knew I didn’t have the discipline or time management skills for the full 31 day stretch, so I cut it down to 15 McConaughey movies by the end of the month. Even that was too much for me. I didn’t particularly care for McConaughey as an actor to begin with, but after watching 15 movies in a row of him doing essentially the same shtick with his mouth hanging open and his eyes occasionally widening when he needed to show emotion, I frankly never wanted to see the guy again. Even just a mediocre impression of his thick Texas drawl was enough to make my shoulders tense and my eye start twitching.

Despite this, I bought a ticket for Surfer, Dude. I kind of felt like I had to. I’d heard some buzz - mostly from Ziah and Morgan - about how absolutely deranged this movie in particular was. Ziah ended year two of McConnaugheMay having seen every single movie in McConnaughey’s filmography, but this one in particular was one that he and Morgan seemed to keep revisiting. They even watched the DVD commentary by McConnaughey, the multi-episode making-of webseries, and the additional making-of featurette. I had to know what it was about this movie that evoked such morbid fascination, and if I could do so with an audience instead of alone in my apartment, I was certainly going to.

The plot of Surfer, Dude is…bizarre. It was introduced to me as a stoner comedy about Steve Addington (McConnaughey), a professional surfer and super chill dude who just wants to surf, smoke weed, and hook up with hot beach babes. 

But, it’s also a semi-futuristic commentary on the exploitation of celebrities in the early to mid-2000s. A TV executive (Jeffrey Nording) buys Addington’s contract and tries to convince him to participate in his The Real World style reality show and to lend his likeness and surfing skills to their upcoming Virtual Reality surfer game. Despite looming financial issues affecting both him and his best friend/business manager (Woody Harrelson), Addington has no interest in that kind of artificial entertainment and wants to focus on real surfing. But, it’s also a reflective character piece about a man trying to rediscover purpose and stability in an unstable world. Suddenly, the waves Addington lived to surf stop coming, and as days and weeks pass with only flat water on the horizon, Addington slips into existential despair and confusion, and he must re-evaluate his life and his values.

That’s not even all there is to it though. The movie bounces between so many plot points and themes that I couldn’t keep them straight. I don’t have time to get into the budding romance between Addington and an employee of the TV executive (Alexie Gilmore), Willie Nelson as a friendly weed-dealing goatherd, Ramon Rodriguez as Addington’s exuberant MTV-star rival, the pact between Addington and his perpetually stoned gang of surfer bros (Zachery Knighton, Nathan Phillips, Todd Stashwick) to abstain from sex and weed until the waves return, or the retreat to Mexico where Addington dances around with palm leaves, spreads ash on his face, and bonds with a random local boy. 

Seeing this in a theater also really highlighted how strange the movie looks. The offices and studios of the TV station, in particular, have this heavy, Twilight-esque green color grading that reminds me more of a procedural crime drama than a stoner comedy. The intention seems to be to make that building feel cold and oppressive in contrast to the freedom of the outside world, but even those shots look gloomy and overcast. It’s a really odd look for a movie about surf and sun and pretty disorienting when paired with the constant beachy background music.

I definitely didn’t leave the Surfer, Dude screening thinking it was a good movie. I honestly was struggling to process what I had just seen and how I was going to describe it in my review. Even so, whenever I heard someone describe it as “bad” I felt a tiny pang of defensiveness. Where was that coming from? I certainly hadn’t liked the movie, so why did I instinctively feel this need to disagree with that description? Still struggling to find the words for my experience, dealing with conflicting feelings toward the film, and needing a bit of a refresher even two days later, I decided I needed to do a little bit of homework. I borrowed Ziah’s blockbuster bargain-bin DVD copy of Surfer, Dude and rewatched the film with McConnaughey’s commentary. I also checked out the Blockbuster-exclusive featurette about the music of Surfer, Dude.

I hadn’t realized that the commentary would be just McConnaughey. The viewing became a lot funnier when I pictured the guy alone in a room watching and rambling about a movie he was in and occasionally just laughing into the silent space with no further comment. I think it’s typical for a commentary track to have some amount of rambling just to fill time, but McConnaughey’s rambling is particularly silly. Over the end credits, he just starts talking about how goats are cooler than sheep, and how they “always look like they may know something that they’re not letting you know they know.”

Around halfway through, I realized how much I was smiling. McConnaughey talks about the project with warm fondness and pride. He compliments members of the cast and crew and talks about specific details and how the filmmakers decided on them. A lot of his laughter was directed toward lines delivered by his talented co-stars, many of whom he considered good friends. In the featurette about the music, he talks about his role as music supervisor and how he and the musicians he brought in for the project created music specific to each character, and we see him moving around the studio and feeling the music. While I still can’t say I’m McConnaughey’s biggest fan, the post-McConnaughemay disdain I’d developed toward him began to wash away over the course of this viewing. 

As Ziah mentioned in his Weird Wednesday intro, McConnaughey closed out his commentary by referring to Surfer, Dude as “the most pleasurable creative thing [he’d] done in [his] career to date, by far.” That’s no small statement considering at that point in his career, he’d already established himself as a romcom leading man and worked with big directors like Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. He said that the goal for the project was “to go out and make a movie - tell a story - with [his] friends and with people who wanted to work together - people who were talented.” In spite of how strange and disjointed the whole thing was, I think a part of me felt that comradery between the actors.  In particular, the scenes with McConnaughey and Harrelson or the stoner guys were very funny, and the actors seemed to have a lot of chemistry with each other.

From my perspective as a viewer, Surfer, Dude is tonally deranged, structurally unfocused, and difficult to fully comprehend. But, I can’t deny that the people behind it had a damn good time hanging out and putting it together and that that feeling came through on screen. Simply put, the vibes were good, and I’ll take ten more meandering and directionless movies with heart and fun behind them over one more technically sound movie without a soul.

I actually do recommend giving Surfer, Dude a watch, and I recommend watching it for the same reason I did - just to see it. Even if you don’t feel that same warmth at the core of the movie, I think you can at least find amusement in the unique strangeness of it. Don’t think about it too hard. Just ride the wave.

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