Point Break (1991)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Had I seen this before: No
I spent a lot of this movie thinking about how 1991 is a sort of liminal space in my mind--it's both the weird half-lit hallway between the 80s and 90s and, for me personally, the weird half-lit hallway between elementary school and middle school. That means a lot of the more grown-up movies from this time period have fallen through the cracks for me because I was slightly too young to see them when they came out but was aware enough of their place in the culture that it never seemed necessary to circle back around to them. It also means the aesthetics of this movie are hard to nail down--some scenes feel very 80s-action-movie but there is a whiff of 90s in the air. For example, it's still the era of dudes just wearing full blue jeans to do beach activities. (See also: Top Gun, and I don't know if you remember but jeans were not thin and stretchy like they are now! They were thick and unforgiving! These pants were made to protect you on the cattle trail, gentlemen! One of many life choices depicted in this film that I will never understand.) But something about the way the bank robbery scenes are shot feel like they are moving the form into the future, and the Bodhi character is just one step ahead of the early-90s hippie revival trend. You can almost hear the strains of "Two Princes" somewhere in the atmosphere, the good doctors spinning us forward into the coming decade.
Let's just get this out of the way: Johnny Utah is an objectively funny name. I assume, since the character is a former football player, that it's a reference to Joe Montana? But before I actually saw this movie I had always assumed that Johnny Utah was like...an alias or a call sign or something. It's not! It's just this square FBI agent's name! Early in the movie you really get the full force of how funny it is when he says "The name's Johnny Utah!" and Lori Petty yells "Who cares!" Listen...I lol'd.
Speaking of Lori Petty, one problem with watching a movie thirty years after it came out is I have often already racked up some strong associations with various actors from their later work. So to me, Lori Petty is our other daughter...Dottie's sister. And I can't take John C. McGinley seriously as mean boss when he is already goofy boss. And most egregiously, Lee Tergesen, who plays a scary man ready to kill Dottie's sister, is 100% the cameraman from Wayne's World who doesn't say two or one. I cannot be scared of this man. But I think it sometimes works the other direction too, in the movie's favor. Coming into this in 1991 I might be tempted to think to myself Keanu is not good at acting, in this case. But now, older and wiser, I know that there is no good or bad, there is only Keanu. Like the many waves in this movie, you can only harness his energy and ride with it. And I did.
Overall the action here is a little too serious and too violent for my taste, but I did enjoy when it went fully over-the-top, which was fairly often--I like when it's just some bros wrestling while on fire, or in the ocean, or free-falling for like six minutes somehow. And when Lori Petty gets mad at Keanu she doesn't just yell at him, she walks into the room where he's sleeping and shoots the pillow next to his head. With a gun. Not to mention the chase scene wherein our ostensible hero fully drop-kicks a dog. Can you believe there was a dog-kicker in this movie and it wasn't Gary Busey? Obviously I am not condoning such behavior, but I usually zone out during chase scenes and let me tell you that snapped me right back to attention. Did he just kick a dog?? This is a film that makes CHOICES.
It's also very funny to me that these extremely competent bank robbers only get caught because one of them moons everybody on the way out the door and shows off a significant tan-line, and then a hair sample shows that they are all being mildly poisoned very specifically by the beach they frequent. Find the beach with the arsenic, says the FBI! This kind of thing plus Dana Scully and Clarice Starling are exactly why I wanted to be an FBI agent until like 1997.
Line I repeated quietly loudly to myself: "I am an EFF BEE EYE agent!"
Is it under two hours: Oooooooooh so close, 2 hrs 1 minute
In conclusion: I tried to determine whether I could tell that a woman made this movie, and I'm not sure I would have picked up on it if I hadn't already known--in some scenes there does seem to be an aura of "Men...why are they like this" but I might just be projecting. All they know is wear jeans on the beach, punch faces while surfing, rob banks, jump out of airplanes, eat hot chip and lie. I'm glad I've now seen this movie and I probably won't need to revisit it. What can I say but vaya con dios.
Baja Shrimp Loaded Fries from Potato Goodness
And I don't even like shrimp!
Up next: I wrestle to the staggering death with a classic of the French New Wave
