THEY'LL GET BETTER AT IT AS THEY GO ALONG: THE BEST FILMS OF 2009

Someone gave me a hard time the other day, demanding to know why I don’t write more about movies everyone has seen—and this was another Rail film reviewer! The answer’s obvious, ain’t it? As much as the mainstream can blow, it blew with particular force in 2009. Meanwhile, as every outlet kept telling us, the heyday of indie film is over. Distributors are dying, venues are shuttered, Netflix and cable obviate the need for theatrical release. Yet the best films this year gave the lie to that thesis; all are international, indie or straight-up arthouse. Even District 9, a blockbuster if there ever was one, felt under the radar, subversive somehow, as if no film with such big box office should be so witty and complex. 2009 gave us few masterpieces and almost as few immersive escapes.
This year, we had to search out the gems.

Beware, beware, beware of the naked man: Baader Meinhoff Complex
1) Baader Meinhof Complex

How could you top this story? Murderous, brilliant, shockingly effective cast-offs of the German bourgeoisie invent modern urban terrorism, merge European and Middle Eastern guerrilla outfits, take psychic control of an entire nation, make a farce of its judicial system and then die/get murdered in prison. The film walks a moral and dramatic tightrope that perfectly captures the psychosis, ambition, rock star sex appeal, and unintentional, homicidal self-parody of Germany’s foremost terrorists of the Vietnam era. Told with a dynamic camera and absolutely no explanation, Complex, like the best films of 2009, leaves you to draw your own conclusions. The overriding conclusion, as with all the best films, is that you have been shown every side of the argument, with no melodrama to ease your way through the complexities.

2) 24 City (Er shi si cheng ji)

Jia Zhang-ke, the best director in the world, here reverts to the grand tableau-like tracking shots of his 2006 masterpiece, Still Life. As Rail film critic Lu Chen observed, these shots parallel the Chinese tradition of narrative pictorial scrolls, with their infinitely unrolling, slowly revealed visions. In 24 City, Zheng’s barely moving camera celebrates and undermines China’s aggressive modernism and the denial—of freedom, of community, of history, of truth—that accompanies it. Or, in certain cases, fuels it. The most beautiful film of the year, 24 City proves the most purely cinematic. In merging documentary interviews, actors pretending to be documentary subjects, portraits, unstoppable upthrusting cityscapes and clanging factories immolating themselves in an orgy of self-demolition, Zheng gives us—as the actual 24 City gives itself—a new form, a way of seeing that digests, even as it ignores, all the forms that came before.

3) Police, Adjective  (Politist, adj.)

Yes, all you whining complainers, by the standards of Transformers or even French Connection, in this policier very little happens. There are no shoot-outs, car chases, or even tracking shots. It’s Romania; no one can afford them. The tension and poetry reside in the understated, telling observation of the clash between duty and conscience in the day-to-day whether at work or in love. Scenes start small and either stay that way or escalate into verbal pyrotechnics that hit harder than any CGI explosion. No one raises their voice, but lives are changed, hearts revived, corruption ensconced. And how many films would dare to base their climax around a dictionary being read aloud? By my count, only this one, ever.

4) District 9An orgy of self-demolition: 24 City

Get some!*

But…some of what?

*( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI)

There went the neighborhood: District 95) Adventureland/ZombieLand

Leading manchild Jessie Eisenberg establishes the brand in two witty, satisfying, not all that dissimilar movies in which amusement parks figure prominently. One offers the bloodsport of late teen romance, the other ditto killing zombies. Eisenberg’s the same guy in both: too smart/sensitive for the room, but capable of a ruthlessness that makes his incisive nebbish routine more than bearable. Both films revel in self-consciously meta-aware dialogue, aware of the character’s own self-consciousness and of each film’s self-conscious determination to warp genre to its own ambitious ends. Both get cute and suffer genre predictability in the third act, but what can you do? On this level of expenditure, it’s a revelation that they get away with as much brainy anarchy as they do. As for Woody Harrelson’s career, clearly he’s in a post self-consciousness, post self-parody space. A space Bill Murray will never occupy, because after inventing it, he long since transcended. Quote of the year: “I know it’s a pretentious affectation, but it relaxes me.”

6) Exodus (Cheut ai kup gei)

Naked frog-men cops beat a crawling man with hammers under a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth as opera blares. With that introduction, you might expect another surreal Hong Kong male-bonding police procedural. While vesting deeply in the color-saturated, overly designed visuals of Hong Kong bros-before-hos master Johnny To, Exodus explores the driving question of film noir reduced to its most basic component: are women trying to kill men? And if they are, can love forestall the murder(s)? In this Hong Kong, it’s not To’s lingering glances between he-men cops that hold the passion. In this world, men and women actually make an effort to understand each other. That effort comes to naught, but they really do try. Really.

7) Surveillance

Bill Paxton and Julia Ormond play a couple who understand one another perfectly. Federal agents whose love and lust burn undimmed, they elicit great jealousy and furious anger from the rural dimwit coppers who need help with a rash of grisly serial killings. Director Jennifer Lynch nabbed Off Broadway’s and indie’s best actors to give depth to a modern updating of the kind of idea that built Roger Corman’s American International Pictures. In Lynch’s worldview, true love should and does triumph, even when it’s knee-deep in blood. Inexplicably ignored upon release, this nasty little tale’s sophisticated perfomances and fiendish back-story sneak up on you, and seem more nourishing after the movie than during. Another great line sums up serial killers and couples dealing with their own passion: “They’ll get better at it as they go along, or maybe they just don’t give a shit.”

8) The Missing Person

Michael Shannon shows up again, in almost every shot of this neglected indie noir. With his toreup face and thousand-mile stare, he so belongs in neglected indie noirs it makes you fear he’ll never become a big-movie leading man like he deserves. A drunken defeated private eye who channels both Raymond Chandler and Elliott Gould’s fractured remaking of Marlowe (in Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye) has to travel on a job. Of course he meets colorful characters (some a bit too damn colorful, as if they didn’t fully understand the phrase “supporting player”), falls inappropriately in love, and ultimately refuses to do what he got paid for. The style, like the story, revels in throwback, and suffers from how poorly its digital imaging conveys the chiaroscuro that noir requires. But Shannon holds it together, and the quiet dignity of his self-degradation might be the performance of the year.

9) In the Loop

Yes, I am an obnoxious wanker!: In The Loop
A relentless, hilarious exercise in Brit-style, Swiftian political truth, wherein everyone—especially those holding the fate of the free world in their hands—proudly acts precisely as venal and short-sighted as they really are. Although it’s simplified so American audiences can understand it (subtitles might have helped, too) and depicted as farce, the incessant narcissistic rage seems a more accurate portrayal of our governing processes than any documentary.

10) The Escapist

One method of escaping: The Escapist
Brian Cox, as everybody knows by now, was so far and away the better Hannibal Lecter it ain’t even funny. Missing the boat on the bigger film featuring that character seemed to hamstring his career, and he’s spent all his time since playing smaller parts. With his orotund voice and brave embrace of his baggy body and poxy face, Cox carries a heavy load of melancholy. His intensity, and the perfect scaling of his emotion to every moment, makes him among the most satisfying actors on the planet. Here he gets to lead, both a film and a prison break. Such films—the good ones—move along predictable lines and still generate suspense. Escapist transcends on the strength of its superb cast (doing their best work to avoid getting blown off the screen by Cox) and—for this kind of exercise—a remarkable, restrained intelligence.

11) Medicine for Melancholy

I know our audience is around here someplace: Medicine For Melancholy
Made for practically nothing, Melancholy manages the trifecta of a singular visual style, story material that you’ve seen nowhere else, and a willingness to poke gentle fun at its own characters. Melancholy makes a virtue of its low budget necessities: street locations, easy naturalist actors, and the smartest parsing of the hipster dilemma ever.

Honorable Mention: Bleeder

BAM presented the work of Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn, the auteur behind the Pusher series. Bleeder is Refn’s never-seen masterpiece, his first picture after 1996’s Pusher 1. Bleeder’s like a Kevin Smith movie—about video store clerks, their girlfriends, and the maniacs who sell them weed—only made by someone smart. Refn grasps what the dead-end Kevin Smith life would really do to its characters, and the violence they might resort to from sheer frustration. Their slacker, supposed solutions are writ in blood or abandoned, leaving someone either dead, maimed, or perpetually stewing. Refn’s rigorous, taut style shows his characters no mercy, and each is shocked in his or her turn when they discover their own true nature. And Bleeder’s still not available on DVD in America.

!Filmed In Lugubrivision! Casino Royale / Tears of the Black Tiger

!FILMED IN LUGUBRIVISION!

Casino Royale

Sean Connery was cool and sadistic. Roger Moore was a smirking impotent alcoholic in a hairpiece. Moore’s casting function was to reassure the producers—who were in Moore’s demographic—that smirking impotent alcoholics in hairpieces could still get laid. His cultural function was to convince First World audiences that old white men could still kick the ass of uppity colonials. Moore never seemed to take on a European: Indians, Africans and darker-skinned South Americans were his preferred targets.

Lonesome Cowboys from Tears of the Black Tiger

After the dead space filled by the robotic Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan marked Bond’s return to a pre-middle age schmoove and to actual competence in the world. Brosnan could shoot a gun, drive a car, wear clothes and, unlike Roger Moore, it was not inconceivable that someone might actually want to fuck him. But Brosnan’s quote charm close quote pulled a heavy load of ironic self-comment. He radiated a 90’s post-modern ‘look at me playing Bond’ vibe. That damaged the franchise in a subtle way, by suggesting that we were all in on a joke, a piquant nostalgia groping for cred. A little ironic distance is fine, but smarmy self-regard is deeply unsatisfying. Bond may be an anachronism, but you don’t have to remind me all the time. I don’t want commentary, I want to escape.

Now Bond’s sincere once more. Daniel Craig is cool and thuggy. He suggests a Connery-sadism: he likes to hurt people. But any connection to Craig as a hero—and the film’s utility as escape—gets wrecked at the outset. Throwing back to the Moore era, Craig chases a black man, an African, through an African construction site filled with Africans. Craig chase the guy relentlessly; the chase scatters damage and African lives indiscriminately. Bodies fly from scaffolding, bulldozers smash buildings, construction workers minding their own business get blown to smithereens, just so one hyper-determined European can nab an African fugitive. The message is clear: when white folks have policy goals, the Third World will just have to bear the consequences.

Franchise-institutionalized racism aside, how dumb can you get? Why wipe out any sympathy for your protagonist from the entire urban market and half the world’s audience? At the close of the sequence, Bond shoots the unarmed black man dead and blows up an African embassy. The disheartening underlying message and the disheartening text (racist chase scenes with no visible plot point) start things off so wrong. How does that sequence, with so many black bodies scattered about, play at any Magic Johnson multi-plex? How is any non-white audience supposed to root for Bond after that?

2001’s thriller Training Day found a solution to this problem that was nothing short of racial/showbiz political genius. Denzel Washington’s a bad guy; he has to go down. The likely candidate to do him is good cop Ethan Hawke. Now, in Hollywood power-karma, no way is Denzel going to allow himself to be offed on-screen by a lightweight like Hawke. And Hawke has a parallel dilemma—he doesn’t want to be branded to African-American audiences as the white boy who killed Denzel. Yet, as the film built to its climax, there seemed nobody else for the job. The meta-suspense of this issue was far more gripping than the text-suspense of the plot.

The solution? The good old reliable Russian Mafia. While technically white, Russian Gangsters 1) wear black balaclavas so their literal racial identity is never confirmed; 2) have no stake in America’s cultural race-wars and are thus more like evil space-aliens 3) are regarded as such super bad-asses that being killed by them brings Denzel no loss of cred.

Why couldn’t the Bond folks have followed Training Day’s fine example and availed themselves of Russian Gangsters, Serbian Flesh-Peddlers or Rogue IRAkillers?

Another curiously misguided motif is the animated opening credits (and, by the way, it’s axiomatic: any film with animated opening credits is not worth seeing. Walk out as soon as they begin to roll.) As whatever lugubrious incomprehensible song played (who would have believed that we’d look back on Live and Let Die as a high-water mark?) the animation always featured hot sort of naked girls in profile. Now it’s shadow-figure guys kung-fuing. Why? We’ll see plenty of kung-fu in the movie. During the credits, we want nipples.

Bond girls were, in the old days, modeled on Vegas show-girls: illiterate, big glittery horsy eyes, garish features (aquiline noses like Pinocchio, giant or prominent tits, rounded asses with gravity systems of their own) and the inability to speak an English sentence as a human being might. They were like ponies on a rotating stand—pinups that moved. The Brosnan era brought a classier level of jiggle interest: woman who could walk & talk simultaneously (while, like Brosnan, somehow commenting on their role as a Bond Girl). Casino returns dishearteningly to girls so plastic and lame that the audience laughed when the first one showed up in a bikini on a horse, desperately thrusting her pelvis while hanging on for dear life. Casting Eva Green as the romantic lead only underscores the problem. The only emotion she communicates is a narcissism so uncut there’s no problem believing she’s French.

It all plays so tired and pointless. The Bourne franchise demonstrates that spy-thrillers can be smart and even authentic in their human relations. Bond is an icon and human—tough duty for any screenwriter. It ain’t necessary to put him in Chekhov. But even Bond can’t come alive if he’s buried in every dead cliché from the past.

Leone-Sirk-O-Rama (In Thai) 
Tears of the Black Tiger

Seeing films from a culture I know nothing about brings an enlightening freedom from meaning. There are moments in Black Tiger that seem screamingly camp, but for all I know of Thai filmic/cultural conventions, they might be butcher than Steven Seagal. Originally released in 2000, and now distributed domestically by Magnolia Films, Tiger harkens to the recent screening at the Japan Society ofSailor Suit and Machine Gun (covered in last month’s Rail). It’s so weird, deranged and sincere that it makes a mockery of films that strive for strangeness (like, say, Takashi Miike’s later work or anything made by David Lynch in the last twenty years).

I’d like to give you a plot summary, but I have no idea what actually happened. There’s a guy named Dum who’s both the fastest gun in the jungle (and dresses like Lash Larue) and a Rock Hudson-like heartthrob who can’t have the rich girl he loves. Or, maybe he does get her in one plot and gets killed before he can in another. Dum has a worst enemy/best friend who’s the second fastest gun in the jungle (and dresses like Tom Mix). It’s difficult to tell from one scene to the next whether Dum’s friend is helping him or about to kill him or both.

There’s a gang of bandits, a corrupt police captain and something about Dum getting kicked out of university, going home and finding his family murdered. The story flashes forward and back; Dum sometimes stands arms akimbo before a lurid neon sky like a Douglas Sirk finale and sometimes blasts twenty villains out of tree-tops and barn-windows with his totally inappropriate World War I six-gun. He does trick shots, too, and the director stops the film and offers us slo-mo replay of the best. After Dum shoots, we get mad super-close-ups of steam rising from his smoking-hot gun. It’s Thai, so if there’s a metaphoric resonance in that shot beyond what a dumb Westerner might assume, I can’t suss it. In other words, if the gun represents more than a dick, its meaning/significance/whatever beats me. This is true of almost all the symbolism in the film; it’s so juvenile it’s profound.

If Ken Russell re-made Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys with Nicholas Ray on acid and Busby Berkeley, the result might be Tears of the Black Tiger. The style, setting, dialogue and action combine West Side Story hyper-stylized movements,Rebel Without a Cause Technicolor wide-screen adolescent longing, Sergio Leone close-ups and music, manga frame-composition, hallucinogenic colors turned up to eleven and an amphetamine camp surrealism that’s all the more dislocating and hypnotic for its utter conviction.

The chaos of the story-line reflects the director’s passion for the Western film motifs he celebrates even as he eviscerates them. Because everything is so stylized, the most powerful emotion that comes through is the director’s joy in making the film. And no matter how anarchic the plot, that joy keeps you riveted. It looks amazing, every second , and is as sweet as it is fun.

Blue Crush: The Higher Horror of the Whiteness

THE HIGHER HORROR OF THE WHITENESS

Or

How  Blue crush sanctifies the blonde

 In the wake of XXX and SIGNS and even GOLDMEMBER, most folks I know who’ve seen BLUE CRUSH are saying: well, it's not that moronic. They’re relieved to have been only a little insulted. I think they ended up not-so-insulted the same way I did: by ignoring the plot, which I expected to be an excuse to parade hardbodies.  But, I was wrong.

BLUE CRUSH proved to be the Bizarro BAYWATCH. BAYWATCH purports to be about life-saving but, as we all know, concerns itself more concretely with showcasing that ass. BLUE CRUSH markets itself as a movie all about the ass, but, at its core, the film pursues transcendence. It’s difficult to be insulted by a clear appreciation for the quest to transcend  (especially when the aforementioned ass appears in abundance). And ain't nothing as transcendent as big wave surfing.

The surfing footage is, as surfers say, epic and the style will seem familiar to fans of home-rental, hardcore 16mm/digivideo surf-movies. But visuals like these have never been attempted in 35mm. The director's properly enthralled by the terrifying sensuality of the sport, and the force of will required to excel. It's a singular will, that surfer's will, requiring that balls-to-the-wall courage and a psychopath’s disdain for consequences merge with cosmic Zen in-the-momentness and attention to the ever-changing nuances of the consistently lethal natural world. The key surfer's ambition is to use the body (never the brain) & Zen & courage to Nail The Moment with understated grace in the face of instant death. This gives even the stupidest surfer a certain spiritual awareness and/or one-ness of self.

That helps BLUE CRUSH conceals its deeply insulting nature, as does the film’s deeply concealed cunning. The girls of BLUE CRUSH espouse and live not only sisterhood, but self-actualization and mutual support and anti-commercialism and non-competitiveness -- about waves and success and guys, like, constantly. Almost as constantly as they peel out of their clothes for no narrative reason while making sure to lift arms and breasts way up in the air and thrust out -- while simultaneously rotating --their smallish rounded booties in the tiniest, lowest-slung, most ass-crack molded, pudenda-shaping, hoochie-short bikini bottoms in the contemporary cinematic universe. And this is not a complaint: I prefer that my jiggle-interest espouse worthy politics. It makes my lust less embarrassing. Even though, weirdly, either the blatancy of their display or the poignancy of such shoddily camouflaged body-exploitation cynicism kept me from actually experiencing lust. My experience was more like: "Look at the abs on that girl!" That is, more of a stunned amazement that consumer culture always finds a way to ratchet up the ante and keep us over-stimulated dupes, uh, stimulated. And my objective appreciation (nay, wonder) never trickled down from the front of my brain to the back.

Or lower..

I thought BLUE CRUSH would be TOP GUN for girls or DIRTY DANCING with surfing. In fact, it’s even simpler than that. On plot alone, BLUE CRUSH is a gender-transposed Wallace Beery wrestling picture, a sports-based personal-growth melodrama of the kind Hollywood’s been making since sound. The astonishing surf-photography --  and the seeking transcendence held therein -- raises the non-plot moments to a higher and more memorable level, but the demands of the plot hold sway. And however desperately the story tries to distract us, the point of the plot seems to be another long-standing Hollywood tradition: The Sanctification of the Blonde.

In pursuit of that Sanctification, BLUE CRUSH avoids certain tropes with disarming no-explanation straightforwardness. After a day of teaching the Himbo love-interest to surf, our Blonde Goddess heroine agrees to go up to his hotel room. She's feels ambivalent in the elevator, and my testicles were tightening into a big cringe in anticipation of the horrors of the obligatory pre-love-scene sprightly chatter to come. Amazingly, there was none: no excuses for the fact that, without preamble, they were just going  to do it. They'd spent a nice day together, they found each other hot, she came upstairs to fuck him and everybody knew it but me, the remnants of another age of movie expectations. Gooey fuck-justifications went out with The Real World, apparently. My testicles relaxed.

Tellingly, though, the himbo lures The Blonde up to his room in by promising to pay her for his surf lessons (he knows she’s broke). He slaps a thousand bucks cash into her hand and then lays a big wet one on her. She melts and he reaches for the tie-string of her bikini. It’s always so much schmoover to pay up front…

The Real World looms large over BLUE CRUSH in its emotive and dialogue style. Blondie cannot act; she never looks ridiculous or embarrassed like the generations of beach jigglers who preceded her. She has genuine self-possession (she is, after all, a beautiful young upper-crust New England horse-jumping blonde) and almost no range. She can smirk, look intense or kind of giggle with a really soul-scarring falseness. (My soul, or what’s left of it, I mean, not hers.) Her giggling seems intended to suggest nervousness at expressing her true hidden depths. And that makes her stumbling attempts at replicating human emotion generate all the more compassion. … So she and her comrades speak in an amped-up horribly ersatz naturalism, like the dialogue in any Cameron Crowe picture or the self-conscious for-the-camera sincerities of The Real World.

Since every plot situation reeks of disingenuousness and necessity, the director seeks to lessens our sense of watching pre-ordained wheels turn by aiming for an elusive teen-conversational veracity between the sistahs. He fails, but the other two girls in this posse are so compelling, lovely and competent that their attempts to play out the cheesy Real World neo-realist style make their scenes moving for reasons I’m pretty certain the director never contemplated. And as you watch the two girls -- who were carefully chosen for their non-pin-downable but unmistakable Other-ethnicity (one seems a Jersey ChicanaRican; the other a Chinese/Hawaiian/Polynesian mongrel with the air of a budding NYC model slumming) -- it seems at first ridiculous, and then entirely intentional, that these more intriguing characters/actresses find themselves relentlessly sucking hind tit, stardom-wise.

Every ethnic in the picture exists only to validate a different aspect of the Blonde Goddess, and to confirm that despite her apparent physical perfection and her throwaway arrogance regarding its effects, she got soul.  This is key because no white hero can be heroic without soul – then they’d just be white. You know, like Kevin Costner. And not only does this superior being got soul, she’s also beloved (or obsessed over) by her inferiors. BLUE CRUSH is a universe of ethnics misunderstanding, underestimating, yearning for just one more little slice of, envying, supporting, deifying, inspiring and/or sublimating their own life & desires in deference to the one representative of the oppressor culture. It’s no accident that Blondie’s sole equal – the only man she could love -- is a Norse God from the Mainland, whose naiveté  and absence of street smarts (which = an utter lack of soul) is proof of his racial purity. And thus, his suitability.

The Norse God passes a key ordeal by learning to surf. The next ordeal occurs when he surfs a local’s spot and is confronted by one of the Yearning Ethnics, a putative Hawaiian local (who sure looks like he went to Little Neck High). The local fights the Norseman because he encroached on taboo ground, but also because The Norseman now possesses what the Yearning Ethnic threw away: the goddess’ love. The sight of the Yearner now embarrasses the Blonde, because he represents an unseemly episode of Fucking Down. And he knows it. The ethnic’s resentment of the Norse God, while played as teenage jealousy, is pure, straight-up class loathing. And the end of the film, the Yearning Ethnic chases another white girl (though her blatant cleavage marks her as lower class and so more likely to throw the Yearner a lil’ somethin’ somethin’). Seeking upward mobility by association, the Yearner forces the Norseman to pose in a friendly photo. The Norseman looks acutely uncomfortable at participating in this piece of class betrayal.

The American International Pictures beach blanket Annette Funiciello surf movies of the early ‘60’s utilized surfing as a backdrop. Surfing was the air the characters breathed, never the focus of their desires, and when the plot ground to a halt, someone was sure to run in and yell: Surf’s up! Everyone would drop what they were doing and go surf.

 In BLUE CRUSH, when events slow down, it’s time for a Minstrel Show. And what better minstrels than two jolly fat black men? The only black men in the film play oafs, boobs, clowns who mock their own bodies, revel in their own disgusting habits and seem to be channeling classic Stepin Fetchit. We first meet one jolly fat black man via a tour of his hotel room, which proves a chamber of anti-bourgeois grossness: puke on the floor, rubbers on the ceiling, pee on the seat, food in the bed, etc. We meet the man himself when the Blonde publicly humiliates him by dangling the rubber in front of his face; she’s the Plantation Mistress scolding the slave for expressing his sexual desire. In his very next scene, the jolly fat black man shakes his bootie in a skirt, demonstrating  the castrating power of the Blonde. Later of course, his willingness to play the clown (which demonstrates that he is a harmless black man) and to surf (which proves his class/race aspirations) allows him to confer upon the Goddess his soulful approval. How? He slaps her five, proving that The Blonde grokked the mysterious black code, and thus, has soul. It’s actually a hundred times more unbearable than this description.

But as much as the jolly fat man suffers, the ChicanaRican suffers more. Her role is the most thankless. She not only constantly encourages Blondie at the expense of her own ambitions, but has to play a scene genuflecting before the family-videotaped image of The Blonde as an itty-bitty six year-old surfer girl. “ I wished I could be you,” says the ChicanaRican wistfully, as the lithe blond limbs and straight blonde hair fly before the waves on the grainy screen. No shit, honey. You and everybody else watching at the mall.

The ChicanaRican, who has the acting chops to back up her charisma, serves as the Blonde’s Tonto, ducking her head with embarrassment at her desire to be the Blonde’s equal while trying to shame the Blonde into accepting the gifts and responsibilities of her class. When the Blonde scores the Norseman – when she hooks up rather than train for the Big Surfing Event -- the ChicanaRican is reduced to guilt-tripping her over her Blonde responsibilities. The ChicanaRican reverts to a screen stereotype not (much) seen since Butterfly McQueen: the head-shaking bewildered primitive who jes’ cain’t figger out why dese white folk don’ hab’  bettah sense! And with all they opportunities, too! It’s an interesting reversal, and one worked to perfection in GONE WITH THE WIND: the supposedly less rational primordial displays shock when The Blonde wallows irresponsibly in primality, the alleged turf of the darker lesser beings.

The Mongrel ethnic doesn’t really have much of a role beyond bootie-rotation, hooting from the car at cute guys, shaking her head at Blondie’s cowardice (and with all her opportunities, too!) and smiling her soulful angelic nasty smile that, in any righteous universe, would have her starring and Blondie playing a snotty waitress in a throwaway scene. And as if all that weren’t enough genuflection before The Blonde, The Blonde’s main competition in The Big Surfing Event -- a funky toughass surf-girl who clearly surrendered all  mainstream social ambitions to ply the sea – actually shows Blondie how to ride the wave of her life. Even the Blonde’s competition can’t resist the impulse toward masochism in the face of racial superiority.

 BLUE CRUSH marks an end to those WILD THINGS/IN CROWD-type teenage girl movies wherein the Country Club Set gets their comeuppance from a unified army of non-blondes and social misfits. This one’s about the triumph of the Cheerleading Class, and is most remarkable for the ethnics’ universal jubilation at The Blonde’s ascendant to Power Romance and  Success On Her Own Terms. The film tries to suggest that Blondie lives in a multi-culti world, and on the superficial level presents her as merely one of Los Pueblos, with her own issues and dreams, just like them. But in the end, only one member of this democracy gets a chance to change her station, and that’s The Blonde. When she does, her entourage takes it as a triumph for their whole little world.

It’s a strange new Hollywood mix: gritty realism in the mise en scene, benign fairy-tale horseshit in the narrative and gruesome racial politics in the guise of diversity.

Plus bootie-rotation, of course, often and in close-up. And the nakedness follows the tautology of the rest of the film. It’s like: well, girls do get half-naked and dance around their rooms, don’t they? We’re just honestly trying to show their lives… And fat black guy are often jolly and self-mocking, right? And Norse Gods cash-rich, modest and well-hung?

I’d claim it’s a totally cynical exercise but I swear, I think the producer/director really wanted to make a surf movie. And for the surfing alone, never mind the politics, it’s worth the money. But can you never mind the politics? The dissonance between its ostensive message and visual/narrative reality is so wearing that the only way to experience BLUE CRUSH may be the only way to experience most current big-studio action-epics: wait six months, buy the DVD and skip every scene that features dialogue.