Hanging 10 with some of the world's best surfers.

Rated PG-13 for brief strong language; 105 minutes.

Opening today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas.

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A massive ocean wave falls over the screen at the beginning of Stacey Peralta's documentary Riding Giants, and you feel like it's falling over you.

Surprisingly, it's a quite pleasant feeling. It's not a dark, menacing special-effects wave, like in The Perfect Storm. It's cool blue and blazing white, at once violent and serene - and as it crashes overhead, enveloping you in the calm depths of the ocean, the idea of somebody trying to surf one of these babies doesn't seem so crazy after all.

Though, as Peralta demonstrates with free-ranging interviews and plenty of exciting surf footage, being a little crazy is a common trait of the best surfers.

Peralta - who chronicled L.A. skate-punk culture in Dogtown & Z-Boys - gives a fast review of surfing history. It began as a sacred endeavor of native Hawaiians, grew into a sport for California enthusiasts, turned into a fad with the Gidget movies, and became a symbol for a particular laid-back lifestyle.

To guide us through these historical touchstones, Peralta centers on three legends of the sport and the surf locations they popularized. First up is Greg Noll, The Bull, who in the '50s was the first Californian to brave the big-wave surfing at Oahu's Waimea Bay. Waimea was my gal, Noll says fondly. If you got a little too cocky, she'd slap your ass and let you know it.

Then came Jeff Clark, who found the giant waves at Maverick's, a spot on Half Moon Bay south of California, and had them to himself for 15 years. When Maverick's became a hot location, Clark became a media sensation.

Finally, Peralta profiles Laird Hamilton, the blond Adonis from Hawaii who found surfing - and his adopted stepfather, '60s surfer and surfboard maker Bill Hamilton - as a refuge from a troubled childhood. Today, Hamilton (one of the film's executive producers) is known for being one of the first tow-in surfers, having someone in a Waverunner tow them farther from shore and into waves as big as 90 feet tall.

In these profiles and a few stories along the way (like a memorial to Mark Foo, who drowned after a wipeout at Maverick's in 1994), Riding Giants presents a breezy and always watchable portrait not only of a sport in ascendance but a way of being. Surfing, Peralta suggests, is more than moves and equipment - it's becoming attuned to nature at its most beautiful and most dynamic.

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