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[Johann]

POINT BREAK (2015)




This is the remake of the 1991 action/adventure film.
Directed by Ericson Core, I highly enjoyed this movie. You want thrilling daredevil stunts?
Look no further. This movie has big wave surfing, extreme motorcross, skydiving, high mountain snowboarding, basejumping, and extreme rock climbing, to name a few.
The FBI is on the trail of a group of extreme sport enthusiasts who perpetuate extreme crimes and get away with them. They have to enlist the help of a new recruit familiar with the stunts named Utah (Heath Ledger lookalike Luke Bracey). Utah chases them all over the globe, with spectacular results. One by one he closes in. Co-starring Ray Winstone & Delroy Lindo. Wonderful cinematography- Core captures every stunt flawlessly, the most impressive being the rock climb at Angel Falls in Venezuela.

[Chris Knipp]

You don't sound like you've seen the classic Kathryn Bigelow original with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, which revolves around surfing. It's a movie I loved from when I first saw it and have rewatched any number of times. Surfing is essential to its mystique, and the edgy bromance between the cocky FBI tyro "Johnny Utah" and the exciting, mystical bad guy known as "Bodhi," lost in this new version. I went to see the remake, of course - but went away feeling empty. I think it would have probably been better to copy the original slavishly, even though the chemistry would never have been there. But they didn't even halfway strive for that; they just put together a "related" story. It might seem exciting and diverting - compared to some of the duds you've been watching. But it got terrible reviews (on Metacritic 34, way into the red zone), because a remake must be judged in relation to what it's a remake of. See Bilge Eberi's Vulture review here.

Uninterested in competing on the bromance front, or even on the action-thriller front, this new Point Break often plays like an extreme-sports documentary with bits of narrative interstitials to carry us along. The production brought together stuntmen and athletes from all around the world for the film’s many setpieces, which include BASE jumping, big wave–riding, motocross, snowboarding, and free-climbing. If you really like that sort of thing, you should see this on the biggest screen you can.

I'm having trouble accessing this website again, by the way. I happen to have access to a computer that accepts me and it together. But my main computer can't connect with "Filmleaf". It's annoying and mysterious. Like somebody up there in computer land doesn't like me.

Talking about Point Break, the 1991 one, makes me want to see it again - though I can never quite recapture the magic of the first watch. Eberi points out the FAST AND FURIOUS films are built on that same kind of macho bro competitive vibe, with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, a really solid duo broken of course by Walker's tragic death at 40. Swayze is gone. But Keanu has a durable persona, it has turned out with the John Wick franchise.

There's also the exhilaration of the (off-season) bank robberies int he dead presidents masks. The original is just so much mindless fun.

[Johann]

You're right, I haven't seen the original Point Break.
If I had, I might be more critical.
And yes, there's not really much of a bromance going on with Bodhi and Utah in this new film.
It has exciting moments and I enjoyed it for that and the exotic locales.

You can't access Filmeaf?
I can't either, unless I make sure to click on the "remember me" box.

[Chris Knipp]

I just rewatched the first twenty minutes of the original POINT BREAK. Really one of my all-time favorite films. Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director (for THE HURT LOCKER), and James Cameron's third wife and sometime collaborator. He cowrote her 1995 film STRAGE DAYS.
Ever see NEAR DARK (1987)? It's the first thing by her I saw, with friends in Chicago, and I saw she was cool, could do great exciting stuff with genre.

She graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, and started out as a painter. Her early life is interesting.

For a while, Bigelow lived as an impoverished artist [in NYC], staying with painter Julian Schnabel in performance artist Vito Acconci's loft. She had a minor role in Richard Serra's video Prisoner's Dilemma (1974). Bigelow teamed up with Philip Glass on a real-estate venture in which they renovated distressed apartments downtown and sold them for a profit.
Bigelow entered the graduate film program at Columbia University, where she studied theory and criticism and earned her master's degree. Her professors included Vito Acconci, Sylvère Lotringer, and Susan Sontag, as well as Andrew Sarris and Edward W. Said,

[Johann]

I'll ask John if he has the original. He has The Hurt Locker (Which was great).
Was Near Dark that vampire movie with Bill Paxton? I've seen that, but it's been a while.

[Chris Knipp]

Hope you can watch it.