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The Advertiser
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Like Home and Away on crack: will Aussies bristle at toxic beach Ockers?
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!


San Francisco Chronicle
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: ‘The Surfer' is Nicolas Cage at his most unhinged
Nicolas Cage's character in 'The Surfer' is a man running on empty. So much of his life is going wrong, and to obtain a shred of dignity, he has put in a bid on his beachside childhood home overlooking the Australian surfing spot he hung ten as a budding young man. All he wants to do is surf this beach, but a group of hard-edge locals — imagine 'Sons of Anarchy' motorcycle gang types, except surfers — led by a weather-beaten Julian McMahon, won't let him. 'Don't live here, don't surf here,' they say repeatedly. When the movie begins, the Surfer (no one in the film has a character name) is taking his son (Finn Little) out to catch waves when the locals stop him. The teen isn't really interested in surfing; this is his dad's thing. He seems uncomfortable around his dad, who is going through a painful divorce from his mother. The dad takes his son home, but returns to the beach, determined to surf. That's it. That's the movie. As the Surfer becomes increasingly desperate in the contest of wills, he becomes unhinged, and in cinema, an unhinged Nic Cage is the best Nic Cage. Really, it seems like this one-of-a-kind film could only have been made with Cage in the lead. It's quite possible that had he passed on the project, Finnegan would have shelved the project. Cage has created his own genre, characters whose madness is a valid response to the increasingly chaotic world around him: The man on parole bent on revenge in David Lynch's 'Wild at Heart' (1990); the bingeing alcoholic in 'Leaving Las Vegas' (1995), which won him an Oscar; the corrupt cop in ' Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ' (2009); the hermit-like former chef in 'Pig' (2021); and more recently, the lunatic carjacker in ' Sympathy for the Devil ' and the befuddled professor who inexplicably appears in people dreams in ' Dream Scenario ' (both 2023). And that's just to name a few. 'The Surfer' has a sun-dappled look of idyllic nostalgia, and feels like an exploitation movie from a half-century ago. It reminded me of 'The Swimmer' (1968), a movie with Burt Lancaster as a man trying to reclaim his standing with the privileged community that has shunned him by 'swimming' across the neighborhood through each of his wealthy neighbors' backyard pools; or the 1971 'Ozploitation' Australian film 'Wake in Fright,' in which a school teacher arriving in a remote small town is forced to go on a weekend drinking binge with the coarse, sweaty locals. Interestingly, writer Thomas Martin and Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan based 'The Surfer' on a real life surfer gang, the Lunada Bay Boys, who ruled a Southern California surf spot in Rancho Palos Verdes and were recently ordered to stay away as part of a legal settlement. I doubt that the Lunada Bay Boys ever had to deal with a character like Nic Cage, though. Who in the real world has? The movies are where his distinctive characters live, and the cinema is better for it.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Yahoo
Surf Gang's Infamous Lair Further Demolished
It's been a hot minute since the Lunada Bay Boys, a 'surf gang' once responsible for a reign of terror against outside surfers in the southern Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes, were in the news. Back in 2016, a lawsuit was filed against the alleged 'gang' for intimidation – rock throwing, tire slashing, verbal and physical abuse, etc. – from out-of-town surfers attempting to ride waves at their coveted home spot. Amidst the legal proceedings, the area was ordered to become more welcoming for visitors: trails for hikers, benches, signage, and the gang's former stone fort demolished. Now, with regards to the latter, further demolition of the Bay Boys' lair has been removed. Specifically, bamboo along the beachside fortress of intimidation was airlifted via helicopter on March 31st. Per the Daily Breeze: 'Palos Verdes Estates will be removing bamboo along the shoreline of Lunada Bay on Monday, March 31, with the aid of helicopters being flown from the Ken Dyda Civic Center in Rancho Palos Verdes. 'The removal of the Arundo grass, commonly known as bamboo and not native to the area, is part of a settlement agreement in September in a lawsuit brought by out-of-town surfers who accused the Lunada Bay Boys, a group of local surfers, of bullying and harassment.'Per the original lawsuit, several Bay Boys were ordered to stay away from the area for at least a year or to pay settlements from $25,000 to $90,000. And further refurbishment of the area continues. 'The city was facing an existential financial risk if the case ultimately had gone against the city,' Christopher Pisano, the city's legal counsel said in a statement. 'This settlement resolves the matter with the addition of modest amenities, which will be designed to maintain the natural feel of the blufftop, and a promise that the city will continue to vigorously enforce the laws protecting coastal access. This is a win for the city given the structure of the beach access laws and the uncertainty of the legal outcome.'