Blue Crush
Plot
Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), Eden (Michelle Rodriguez), and Lena (Sanoe Lake) are three young friends who live and breathe surfing. With a big competition looming Anne Marie has a chance to go for the big time, however she first has to deal with her own fears. Not only that but she falls for a pro football player who’s visiting the island (Hawaii) and this has becom...
Plot
Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth), Eden (Michelle Rodriguez), and Lena (Sanoe Lake) are three young friends who live and breathe surfing. With a big competition looming Anne Marie has a chance to go for the big time, however she first has to deal with her own fears. Not only that but she falls for a pro football player who’s visiting the island (Hawaii) and this has become a serious distraction for her.
Review
I wasn’t really looking forward to watching this film at all, having seen the trailers I was expecting some kind of Bring It On with surfboards. In fact if I hadn’t had to review it then I probably would have never watched it. So it was with some trepidation that I popped the disk into the DVD player and prepared for what I expected to be 100 minutes of boredom.
To my surprise, I came from it having watched a reasonable film, not outstanding or moving in any way but an enjoyable enough experience. The plot itself is your basic unimaginative spiel of: Working class nobody who happens to be extremely gifted at x sport, gets a chance to compete with the big guns and become a big shot overnight. However they first have to overcome their fears. Throw in your love interest and that pretty much covers it.
Pretty bog standard plot I think you’ll agree, I guess the only break from the norm is the reversal of the usual gender roles for this type of film.
The plot here is not only bland and unimaginative but it also lends itself to a few problems. The speed in which the lead character Anne Marie And the male lead fall so deeply in love (and jump straight in the sack) is a little unrealistic. The characters of her best friends and rebellious younger sister are hideously stereotyped and the dialogue is incredibly cheesy in places.
On the positive side the makers had the decency to not use the subject matter as an excuse to parade almost naked bodies all across the screen Baywatch style. Yes the girls are young and attractive and yes they do spend a lot of the film in bikinis, but the way it’s handled gives the impression that this is more a by product of their chosen sport than an excuse to show young semi-naked flesh on screen.
The thing that really pulls this film from the depths of mediocrity though is the cinematography. From the locations of crystal blue waters and golden sandy beaches to the breathtaking underwater / wave shots the film is a joy to watch. The shots of the immense power from a wave breaking and the way in witch they can pull you down and hold you under, really gave an understanding of the kind of conditions the surfers face. I found that I could almost turn off the plot and ignore it and just enjoy how great the film looked.
It was probably fortunate that I approached this film with such low expectations as I guess the only place it could go from there is up. It’s certainly not one that I would revisit time and time again, however as a surfing film there are certainly far worse ones available and if you’re into this particular genre then I’d definitely say go for it.
Video / Audio
I’ve seen a few reviews that have complained that the video quality on the disk is quite poor, with artefacts excessive grain etc. Personally I couldn’t see any problems but this may be down to my projector, I recently had the lenses upgraded and even the poorest of disks seem to look great with it. The picture is presented in a 1.85 Anamorphic format, and as I said looked fine to me, not exactly reference material but certainly good enough.
Given that most of the surfing sequences were actually filmed on the water instead of in some pool, there’s plenty of opportunity for impressive atmospheric sound. Thankfully the disk doesn’t disappoint with thundering waves and satisfying splashes. Overall dialogue is clear although voices do tend to be a little drowned out on some of the ocean bound sequences. The audio format is Dolby Digital 5.1
Extras
The director’s commentary from John Stockwell is actually very good. He goes into some detail about how the many surfing scenes were filmed. None of it was filmed in a controlled pool environment; everything was filmed out in the sea. He also points out when the scene is the real girls, a double in or even a double with the girls faced superimposed on in CG. He also goes into some detail pointing out continuity errors which to be honest I didn’t notice any of.
I couldn’t tell you if the second commentary from the three leading ladies is actually any good as it just made me angry and I couldn’t listen to it. They all have that really annoying American Teen way of talking, every sentence finishes with “like whatever” or “like way rad” etc.
At just over 14 minutes long the making of documentary suffers from the usual problems of being an extended trailer mixed with interviews with cast & crew all saying how great everyone was. There’s a collection of deleted scenes totalling around 18 minutes or so. They have an optional directors commentary, there’s a mix of good and bad scenes here and it seems a shame that some of them were cut.
Filming Blue Crush is a nice little extra, it’s only around 4 minutes long but even in that short time it reveals far more about the filming of the surfing scenes than the making of does in it’s whole 14 minutes. Some of the more minor extras include a short on women in surfing, a collection of wipeout scenes from the film with Directors commentary. Riding the waves is a collection of more outtakes, Skateboarding is a collection of more footage from the scene in a party. Blue Crush promo is a short kind of preview trailer designed to show to studio reps again this contains option commentary.
Surf Fashion is a 5-minute feature of Sanoe Lake going to a Billabong shop and basically shopping for Bikinis. The World Of Surfing is broken into six sections and basically contains text pages on the history / culture etc of surfing. To finish off we have a Lenny Kravitz music video and a Theatrical Trailer. The film itself is broken into twenty chapters and subtitles are available in Arabic, Czech, English, Greek, Romanian and Turkish.
Overall
A reasonable film that’s really helped along by the astounding cinematography, if you like surf films then I’m sure you’ll love it. The DVD itself is well presented with good audio and video quality. The extras are extensive although quality and content vary considerably.
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