Blu Water/ Summer/Heaven Ray

Summer - if you can't be at the beach, watch Blu-ray movies on a big HD TV that have lots of good ocean footage, underwater caverns, surfing, bikinis. Whassapppbra! Blu-ray can make these images so 3-D vivid that if you put some coconut oil under your nose, some coco de oro in your hair, baby you're there. 

As der ausgezechneiete Hasselhof's Baywatch proved, people feel relaxed looking at the beach, the surf, even if just on TV. Give them tanned bodies and lolling surfs, and just enough plot to keep their analytical mind from getting restless, to keep you looking at the screen until the surf images trigger inner waves of relaxation, a feeling of bobbing up and down in the current, and urges to buy sponsored products... Pamela Anderson was a great poster child for this sort of no-fault / no-foul proxy pleasure trip. But Jessica Alba has her beat, if only because her acting is moderately better, her features less synthetic, and she seems genuinely healthy and athletic rather than one step away from Hep-C.

INTO THE BLUE (2005) 

I saw this at a press screening back when it came out, on a big big UWS screen and so I knew in advance that all the brilliant underwater footage of swimming with sharks was more or less 100% real. I was stoked--that is the word, my friends, "stoked"--to find INTO THE BLUE lived up to the hype... of its press release. Criticisms of the overall douche-bagginess of the two himbo leads (Paul Walker and Scott Caan) aside, when you can't even sneer more than a a handful of times, even when the righteous Walker is throwing away bags of coke out of principle, then you know a movie's not bad. And you don't really want a movie like this to be "good" because then it would be awful, you know what I mean? You want it to be good enough to be hold your interest, bad enough to not stress you out during the 'tense' cross-cutting.

INTO THE BLUE marks also one of the first times I ever laid eyes on Josh Brolin--hidden under cap, glasses and beard, I thought he was Matt Dillon going incognito--and even though he's the bad guy, he's so cool you root for him anyhow. He's one of the few non-douche bags in the film! In fact all the bad guys are cooler than the leads!

In fact I saw this on Blu-ray  last night with a young woman who didn't even recognize it was Josh Brolin under the hat, shades, and facial hair either and yet she was all, like, "I'm rootin' for that guy - he seems like he could be my uncle." This is some of my original 2005 Muze review:

"It's based on THE DEEP, a 1977 film that tried to capitalize on the JAWS phenomenon of the time but disappointed audiences by forgetting the sharks. This version is a much more exciting film and features shark attacks and real sharks swimming among the actors, thereby righting a 32-year-old wrong. Director John Stockwell also did BLUE CRUSH (2001), so it's a given there's no skimping on the beautiful scenery, both above and below the water line. With the gorgeous bikini-clad Alba undulating through the water like a mermaid, this movie becomes, in its own unique way, a perfect 10." (Muze c.2010)

  BLUE CRUSH (2002)

Underwater and/or beach movies are cool, but the best in my mind are "water-line" movies, those that plunge in and out of the waves and give you the effect of actually being in them -- like after a day spent in the ocean when you're lying in bed and can feel the ocean current still tugging at your body. Director John Stockwell's first big blue movie, BLUE CRUSH nails this with surfer-eye-level views of the clear blue Hawaiian waves, bobbing up and down like we're out there waiting our turn with the locals. Why isn't this on blu-ray yet? Answer me!

Here's an updated version of what I wrote in Bright Lights back in 2008, and it still goes:

The common critical response to the film at the time was that the awesome photography more than made up for the trite story and bland acting, but critics have always had a hard time with accepting truly free girl characters; if you can look past the surface colloquialisms this is practically a Howard Hawks film for young women: overlapping dialogue; strong camaraderie, good sense of continuity and pace, issues of courage, maturity and nobility. It’s all there, and best of all, the issue of romance getting in the way of your dreams–yeah you heard me, ladies, getting in the way of instead of being your dreams-–is handled with care and ballsy skill.

Matthew Davis plays the vacationing quarterback who romances Hawaiian surf rat Ann Marie (Kate Bosworth) causing her to lose focus right before the big pipe competition. Michelle Rodriguez is the best friend/trainer who sees what’s happening and knows Ann Marie is just scared she’ll hit her head on the coral reef, like she did last time. Real-life surf champ Sanoe Lake is, just, well, awesome; she’s a natural star and makes a perfect third in their posse, letting her surf sisters carry the emotional weight while she brings sandy authenticity and a deeply entrenched-in-the-termite-moment joi de vivre. When she rolls out of bed to answer the phone with a sleepy “how are the waves?” instead of aloha, you feel like you’re right in bed with her, covered in sand, and still drunk from falling asleep three minutes before.

Plus, there’s even a surreal horror element--like a META-TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE--when you see this one dude surfing wearing Kate Bosworth’s face (above). What? Maybe that's why there's no Blu-ray for this title? Too much detail on the Bosworth surfing long shots might turn the whole thing Tobe Hooper?

MIAMI VICE (2008)

Sooner or later, vice cops make criminals of us all, but hey, maybe they have mutton chops. Crocket and Tubbs fund their jetset lifestyle with confiscated houses, money, boats, and cars from busted cocaine traffickers, which means they have the morals of a guinea pig and the ethics of a gangster, fucking narcs! Would'st thou arrest a lemon tree it if it drops lemons upon thy head, officer? And I don't even like cocaine; I've seen it turn too many of my friends into corpses or windbags or worse.

So, for all its acidemic incorrectness, MIAMI VICE still made the "decade list" of the inestimable Keith Uhlich over in the House Next Door. The British Time Out Film Guide meanwhile notes Mann’s got “images intricate in their expressionist eloquence and mythic in their noir poetry.” What does America’s Leonard Maltin book say? “Super cool cars, boats and planes keep this watchable on a fantasy level, but the final showdown is awfully conventional.” Whaaaa? "Super cool"? Lenny, the British just made you look stooooopid!

And Lenny, bro, one more thing: applying “conventional” to Mann is like applying “predictable” to the story of Madame Butterfly: “Colorful Clothes and impassioned singing make this passable, but still ends on the same depressing note.” Mann uses cop conventions like Puccini uses romantic tragedy or John Ford uses the western. The final showdown in VICE is actually unconventional in its conventionality, carrying various metaphysical significations, such as that yin/female energy is interconnected and serpentine, and how --on certain nights, you "can feel it / comin' in the air" - and by the dawn, everyone you know will either break up with their current lover and/or hook up with their new, as if some magic equalizing ripple effect gives and takes away in equal measure.

Great minimalist dialogue, great use of Moby featuring Patti Labelle ("One of these Mornings"), and those great trailer park mutton chops, and Colin Farrell doing what L. DiCap couldn’t do in BODY OF LIES, which is impersonate Russell Crowe successfully.  These guys are super tough and every line of dialogue is emptied of everything but professional balls-to-the-wall plot advancement. In their own way this Crocket and Tubbs talk as mystic-existential as the driver and mechanic in TWO LANE BLACKTOP.

 So there's three summer fun films for you, and also check out A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009), which is also another blue water / Blu-ray summer must, this time starring Milla Jovovich and one of my new favorite B-list beefcakes, an Eastwood-talkin' bro named Timothy Olyphant! (my review here).