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August
21, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
Flashdanceing
on Water
Blue
Crush recycles.
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 ven
though the "motion" in motion pictures is an illusion —
remember, you're just watching a series of still photographs moving very
rapidly before your eyes — there's nothing more exciting than a movie
on the move. The 1979 film American
Gigolo is a stinker, but it has a fantastic opening two minutes
that feature little else besides the wheel of a Mercedes convertible hugging
the roadbed of the Pacific Coast Highway at 70 miles an hour. The movie
was a hit in no small measure because of that title sequence.
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As a piece of storytelling,
last weekend's new movie Blue
Crush is indefensible. It's corny, it's stupid, and the actors
are uninteresting. But no movie before it has ever quite captured the
motion of the ocean, and it's thrilling to watch. Blue Crush is
a movie about surfing, the most photogenic of human activities, and director
John Stockwell and his cinematographer David Hennings have come up with
an entirely new way of filming it. The camera goes underwater and then
back out again in a single smooth move — like a human body. When
our heroine, Anne Marie (played by a real live Barbie doll named Kate
Bosworth) is pulled under by a big wave and in danger of hitting her head
on a coral reef, you can feel yourself struggling to pull up and away
from the ocean floor as she is. That's how vivid an experience Blue
Crush is at its best.
But really, if you're
going to remake a movie and set it in the world of surfing, does it have
to be Flashdance?
Blue Crush is very nearly a scene-for-scene copy of Flashdance,
except that Anne Marie has a little sister to take care of instead of
an old lady. She gets fired from her working-class job but meets a nice
rich guy in the process, just like in Flashdance. She has two buddies
with whom she works out and does things in low-cut clothing while the
camera ogles them. And just like the Jennifer Beals character in Flashdance,
Anne Marie is AFRAID! AFRAID of FOLLOWING her DREAM! AFRAID that she JUST
CAN'T CUT IT! And the BIG COMPETITION is TOMORROW!
Honestly, Blue
Crush's storyline is only bridging material for the various surfing
scenes, so why couldn't Stockwell and his co-writer Lizzy Weiss have remade
Wuthering
Heights on surfboards, or Stage
Door on surfboards or almost anything else besides Flashdance?
We all enjoyed that movie when it first opened in 1983, but every time
they try to make a new one — like the horrendous Coyote
Ugly a few years back — it makes you wonder whether in the
minds of Hollywoodians, Flashdance now seems like a timeless classic.
But maybe it's all
got to do with age. I was horrified to read last year that Michael Douglas
was planning to star in a remake of The
In-Laws, the Peter Falk-Alan Arkin picture that I consider one
of the funniest movies ever made. Why would anybody want to remake a movie
released in 1979? I was in college when I saw The In-Laws! Then
I realized that The In-Laws is 22 years old and by Hollywood rules
more than ready for a new visit. And if The In-Laws is 22 years
old, that makes me 22 years older than when I saw it.
Which maybe makes
me ripe for a remake. I just hope I'm more interesting on the second go-round
than Flashdance.
—
Mr.
Podhoretz is a columnist for the New
York Post.
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