What’s this all about? I turn 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m going to watch one movie a day for 30 days and spend 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 1991. Click here for the original newsletter in the series.
There is no subtlety in “Point Break.” FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is chasing surfer/bank robber Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), Bodhi is chasing enlightenment via adrenaline high; both are chasing something bigger than themselves. I love this movie because the crazier it gets, the more everyone involved just goes with it.
The first real big moment between Bodhi and Johnny is the night football game scene, with Johnny doing everything in his power to tackle Bodhi during a game of beach football (a homoerotic reading of this movie is extremely valid, and it has been read that way before by many). Again, it’s not subtle- and tells you everything you need to know about these characters through action. The action is the dialogue here. And that’s because the dialogue is so outrageous that it’s poking fun at the audience and poking fun at macho cop movies of the ‘80s in general.
Indeed, it’s the stereotypical embodiment of a cop movie at first, with the introduction scene where Johnny Utah is yelling exposition to John C. McGinley’s character and getting his new partner Pappas (Gary Busey) all fired up about wanting to catch some bank robbers.
But while the written dialogue is cheesy, the action dialogue is deathly serious. Kathryn Bigelow — what a director. One of the best action directors of our time. This movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Hurt Locker,” “Near Dark” (Oh man, “Near Dark,” what a movie. Go see that if you haven’t). With “Point Break,” she somehow makes you believe in each stunt, as if it was the only possible outcome of this movie that of course, Johnny Utah would end up robbing a bank; of course, a death-defying skydiving jump would be in the cards. Each setpiece ups the ante from the one prior. (Setpieces that have been oft-imitated, never-duplicated, by the way — I’m convinced “The Dark Knight” borrows as much from this movie’s climax as it does from “Heat.”) “Point Break” succeeds at being a great entry into its genre while also deconstructing its genre.
But that doesn’t mean its cheesy dialogue isn’t fun to quote, which is part of the reason I chose it for the 1991 entry of this series:
“Utah! Give me two!”
“The bank robbers…are surfers!”
“I caught my first tube today, sir.”
“If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”
And I quote this movie so much, and enjoy this movie so much, because of the people who introduced me to it. I had seen “Point Break” before 2014, but only in bits and pieces on TV. I knew the story — cop chases criminal, cop becomes friends with criminal, cop and criminal eventually respect each other despite their differences and the cop lets the criminal go in the end — because “The Fast and the Furious” blatantly ripped the movie off, right down to Paul Walker doing his best Keanu Reeves impression, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it until I started working at my first job out of college.
My first job after graduating was at the Wise County Messenger, a community paper in Decatur, Texas. I didn’t know anybody in Decatur, so I became quick friends with my coworkers. And the sports editor there at the time (he’s now the executive editor) had a foam Ohio State Buckeyes football helmet on his desk that he got somewhere as a promotion for something. He’d wear it sometimes when we were on deadline for football games and he would quote “Point Break” while he was doing it, in honor of Ohio State’s own Johnny Utah. it became a running joke with everyone in the newsroom to quote that movie at various moments.
When I left that job, that editor’s parting gift to me was that helmet, signed with the staff’s favorite “Point Break” quotes. I still have it, and I started wearing it every Friday night when I would cover high school football, to keep the tradition alive.
That helmet is a great conversation starter. I kept it on my desk at work for every job I’ve had since (back when I could actually go into an office to work at a desk) and it’s always funny when someone asks me if I went to Ohio State, I say no, explain what it is, and then we end up riffing about “Point Break” for a little bit. And I think about where I was when I started my career.
Even though “Point Break” is set in California, when I think of this movie, I don’t think about California, I think about Decatur. I think about sitting in a newsroom at 2 a.m., jittery with coffee and low on sleep waiting for high school football pages to send to the publisher. I think about gallows humor while covering tough stories and using dumb movie quotes as in-jokes, which isn’t novel by any means but meant a lot to me at that job at the time.
I think about the notion of journalism itself, which is imperfect but should be in service of truth, like how Johnny Utah and Bodhi were both seeking out ways to chase something bigger than themselves, however misguided.
That first reporting job was a lot like how this movie was made, too: Fun, dumb humor, but always taking the action seriously. And for that, I love this movie because it’s not only a fun, well-made action movie, but it reminds me of a time in my life where I was wondering if I could work in this industry at all, and Richard Greene and the Messenger crew helped me figure out, that yeah, I could.
And this movie about bank-robbing surfers, of all things, helped me realize that.
Up next: We’re going to go to 1992, and figure out how many secrets are too many secrets with “Sneakers.”
Letter of Recommendation
Do you make up voices for your dog? Don’t lie, yes you do. It’s OK, I do it, too. And apparently, as this piece in the Washington Post points out, so do a lot of dog owners. My favorite part of that article is all the audio clips where people talk like what they think their dog would sound like if it could speak. (For the record, Pudge sounds like Brad Garrett and Opal sounds like a Russian Emma Thompson.)
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