ARE YOU READY FOR THE RUSH ? "POINT BREAK"

I’m pretty sure I made my opinion concerning Kathryn Bigelow pretty clear earlier in this blog. Like a lot of women who are also cinephiles, I too did a little jig of victory when finally a woman walked off with the Oscar® for Best Director. I was a little disappointed with The Hurt Locker though. Not a bad film in my opinion but still, it could have been something else. My course demands (or demanded at some point) that I educate myself a bit more on Ms. Bigelow. This is how I have ended up sharing my impressions with you today. I have incredibly mixed feelings about Ms. Bigelow. This usually disqualifies whoever it is from actually making it to the blog. But in this case I’ve made an exception, not least because the good bits – the bits I liked – were actually very good. I mean credit where it’s due sort of thing. I mean I wish I could gush about it, I really do. But the best I can manage under the circs is “meh, well…”
Point Break is basically a cop drama. It has the large benefits of being able to keep the adrenaline pumping from beginning to end, and the looks of Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze (who, let’s face it ladies, was quite something back in the day). Keanu Reeves plays 25 year old brand-spanking-new FBI agent Johnny Utah. On his first day on the job he is paired up with veteran cop Angelo Pappas who is eccentric – to put it mildly. The division is bank robbery and Pappas can actually use all the help he can get because a gang calling themselves the “Ex-presidents” has robbed around 30 banks in three years without getting caught. Pappas has a hunch. He is pretty sure these men are surfers. Johnny, eager to earn his stripes on his first day, goes undercover in to the surfing community to try and see if he can root out who is behind these robberies. One of the people he meets undercover is Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) adrenaline junkie and surfer extraordinaire. Bodhi’s charisma, coupled with the charms of Tyler, Bodhi’s sexy ex-girlfriend with whom Johnny begins to grow quite close, after a while surfing becomes more than just an undercover mission for Johnny. On the other hand, the operation seems to be closing in on the gang… Will Johnny be able to choose the right side when the time comes?
Now let me tell you what this film is really about. It’s about the choice between a 9 to 5 job and a conventional life or doing something different. It’s all about that moment, about a month or so after you start your first job when you look back on your day - usually on a particularly bad day – and ask yourself with sincerity and openness whether or not you have made a terrible mistake. Now this may or may not be the case depending on your personal talents and abilities. Your vocation may actually be as a musician or a fire-eater and you may never know it. Alternatively, you may just be having a bad day, nothing a drink with mates after work can’t solve. Now, as I said this is very obviously what the film is really about; but I do wish Ms. Bigelow had made the choice a little more ambiguous. I get what she means by the surfer lifestyle - and Bodhi / Patrick Swayze puts the case very eloquently and with a lot of charisma but at the end of the day, there is no choice to be made, not really. There are some interesting plot-twists and some very solid, innovative camera-work. The story never loses momentum for a minute, if that is, you are willing to push the fact that it is chock-full of every single Hollywood cliché you can think of to the back of your mind. I won’t say it’s predictable from beginning to end, but it comes pretty damn close. I mean, I like this theme, it’s deep, and in the context of policing and crime something “heavier” could have been done with it – and it has been done too as a matter of fact – I honestly feel that this film was a missed opportunity… Enjoyable yes, but cannot go beyond the banale…

THE END OF THE WORLD WEEK WITH JOHNNY MNEMONIC

This is one of those late ‘80s early ‘90s films that everyone remembers with a kind of… Nostalgia? Disdain? I don’t know. Sci-fi films of that era (in fact any era gone by) suffer greatly these days, don’t you find? I mean, technology has come on in gigantic leaps and bounds, with films like the Matrix (trilogy), Lord of the Rings and what have you on our hands, any previous and feeble attempt is well… Sneered at. If you like the genre, I can’t blame you. I mean, most of us watched the Matrix for example, right? I mean at least the first one if not all three (I honestly wouldn’t have watched all three unless it was kind of necessary for my self-education but there you go). Remember the effects there? Wow. So I get why you might pat Johnny Mnemonic on the head and let it pass… But it was when I actually saw the film advertised on TV when it hit me… The slogan they used can be roughly translated to English as “Before the Matrix… There was Johnny Mnemonic.” I took one look at it and thought “Damn right”. The topic, the casting (Keanu Reeves leads in both – heck of a coincidence, no?) in every respect. In a lot of respects Johnny is a kinda prequel to the Matrix. As you know, the story of the Matrix opens in a time where machines have taken over the world (I’m putting it very basically, don’t jump down my throat). Here, it is sort of just before that happens. Machines are getting more developed, fusing with humans, big corporations are pushing them on, getting greedier and greedier…
In this dark world exist people like Johnny (Keanu Reeves). He is what is called a “Mnemonic courier”. What that means is that he has a computer implant in his brain (mechanic and computerized implants and chips in the body are apparently common in 2021). The implant is a sort of storage device. Think of it as a hard drive stuck in your brain. He uses the device to courier information back and forth. He earns well but he wants out. He has had to give up a lot of his long term memory to be able to have the implant – he no longer thinks it is worth it and wants his life back… Trouble is, he has to do one last job… But in this last job something goes wrong. Johnny, eager to just get it over with, takes on way more data than his implant can take. It’s no sweat really; he easily has 2 or 3 days before the data seeps out and kills him. Problem is, getting to his destination is going to be a bit of a problem. The yakuza that have been hired by a mega company are out to kill him… The information Johnny has in his head is extremely valuable… Unwittingly, he has in fact taken on something that could change the destiny of the planet for ever…
Now, I have to admit even the story line makes you smile. “One last job” – but something goes wrong… How many times did we hear that one eh? There is a girl involved of course. And a resistance group who fights the corporations that have almost literally taken over the world. All the clichés of the 20th century are there. Thing is, so are a lot of things that we see time and time again afterwards. I mean, from the smallest to the biggest thing… From the touch screen computers (well very early interpretations of – I’m not talking about tablets by the way but the stuff you see on Minority Report or CSI these days) to the whole concept of people being hooked up to computers and the internet (now what does that remind you of, hm?) come to the screen for just about the first time here. There is even a direct reference to the famous sci-fi anime “Ghost In The Shell” (a fascinating work that also takes place in a world were humans can fuse with machines. The whole question of machines with souls thus arises and one of the characters – her soul that is – is uploaded into cyber space, highly recommended if you haven’t seen it). And you will see that a lot of mediocre sci – fis have copied and referenced Johnny since then.
I know that this film can be considered “quaint” at best by some standards, and I’d have to agree with you. But it is also kind of an historic film, the first time a lot of things happened. Not to mention the whole thing with machines and humans – a topic we may well have to actually tackle in the future… A “must-watch” by my standards.

MORE CARTOONS ANYONE? TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED : "A SCANNER DARKLY"

Now, in telling its story, this film employs a rather original technique… Now, the whole thing is an animation, no doubt about that but the animated characters are real actors. Drawing of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrellson and Winona Rider (she’s the epitome of the 90’s as far as I’m concerned, it was a bit of a surprise to see her acting in a 2006 film if you see what I mean… ) parade around the screen making one feel decidedly odd. But odd is good in this particular case and experimental. Almost a nice mid-way solution for those who don’t particularly like animations, a wonder we didn’t think of it before… Apart from a few sci-fi details the whole film is set within “real” boundaries too, no weird space creatures (well there is a creature from another dimension but in context it’s actually quite acceptable), no one flying through the air… Serious and sci-fi never the less. And very thought provoking…
In the future – but not the too distant future – the world has become a much more totalitarian place… Security cameras are everywhere recording our every move, undercover cops everywhere trying to uncover God knows what… The biggest problem is D, also known as Death. That by the way is not a bad joke but the name of a highly addictive drug; little red pills that first give you a massive high and then of course, by degrees, destroy you. Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is one of the good detectives working on the gangs selling “D”. He is undercover, completely so because at his office he wears a “scrambler suit” preventing him from being recognized and is known as Agent Fred. He spends time as Bob Arctor with a bunch of small-time dealers and addicts, trying to get to the “bigger picture”. However as the operation deepens, Arctor has to take more and more D to keep “in” with the suspects. Plus when he (Agent Fred) is given the bizarre directive of keeping an especially close eye on Bob Arctor things start getting tricky… And schizophrenic… In more senses than one…
It doesn’t take long to realize this is a very “anti system” film. Not anarchist in any way but anti-totalitarianism, anti-big companies having their own agendas and controlling everything. It’s sci-fi of course, none of it is based on real events but the dedication at the end seems to imply it is in the memory of security service agents who were irretrievably harmed in the line of duty. It isn’t a “down with everything” type of message though. This is very clearly a dystopia, “look, this is what we could become. Let us do our best not to be so”. And this should be done by being anti-totalitarianism of all kinds. Not letting anyone get too strong for the common good. It’s a good film and a good moment to stop and reflect on what could happen without freedom. Something we should possibly do more often…