Friday, February 14, 2003

He Makes the Sign of the Teaspoon, She Makes the Sign of the Wave

It's been a long time since I watched a teen movie, and Blue Crush made clear to me how the rules of the genre have changed (it's been even longer since I was a teen, but let's not get into that now...).

Blue Crush was an odd mix of the calculated and the slapdash. It was edited to within an inch of its life, with slo-mo and replays and multiple angles; the camera work was staggering, bringing you right into the heart of the waves; he colors had been tricked-out in a digital tweak; the omnipresent music was superbly calculated—mostly hip-hop tracks remaking or prominently sampling big hits of the 70s and 80s, which is a genius move: the parents seeing this can nod knowingly along with the kids.

But the acting was loose and improvisational—characters stepped on each other's lines, or repeated themselves, or muttered banalities or non-sequiturs: even when they made big speeches, it seemed less like acting per se than like, well, people making speeches to each other—speeches they've rehearsed a dozen times in their heads. All in all, it resembled nothing so much as a Very Special Episode of Road Rules. And that, right there, brings home the influence of MTV on Yoof Kulcha—not the videos themselves (I'm not even sure MTV still shows videos...), but its "reality" programming. The Real World has become the soap opera: the quasi-documentary, not the conventional drama has become the teen movie's model for presenting itself.

Once I figured that out, I was able to see that this was a pretty good movie. True, it didn't exactly demystify its subject—if possible, I know less about surfing now than I did before watching the film—but it did convey the visceral thrill and the danger of it. And its politics were interesting—not so much its gender politics (though there was the tiniest hint of a lesbian subtext to the Michelle Rodriguez character and the way she lived vicariously through the protagonista), but its class politics: it's set in a resort town, on the wrong side of the service economy, and is unflinching about the poverty, the complete lack of prospects, the resentment and parochialism that breed when your fate is either to serve the tourists directly (as a chambermaid) or indirectly (as "local color"). American movies are usually so reluctant to tackle class issues at all that it was doubly refreshing to see this played out in a Youth Entertainment.

It's probably also the first teen movie to be based on an article by Susan Orlean, so, you know, there's that.

About Michelle Rodriguez, though: I found her disappointing in this movie. She came to her first role, in the interesting little movie Girlfight, completely untrained as an actress but with a slouchy physicality that burned off the screen. Now, several films into her career, she's still playing the same card, bringing to her roles an undeniable presence but very little craft. Apparently, developing her chops as an actress is not high on her list of priorities, and she's choosing roles that don't require her to stretch her instrument. This strikes me as a shame: many actors do eventually slip into self-parody, of course, but it's distressing to see it happen to someone so early in her career.

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