Blue Crush Wipes Out

Movie fails APAs, despite some advances for women

Hollywood has always had its “Hawaiian Eye,” out for a good island story. Thomas Magnum, Jack Lord and the big Kahuna know Hawai‘i provides a glamorous, lush and jungle-y palette for TV programs and films ranging from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Windtalkers. Eh bra, where’s the great Hawaiian surfing flick?

Don’t go to Blue Crush expecting to find it, though in all fairness, this summer movie incarnate succeeds swimmingly as a women’s sports movie, mainlining more girly power and paddling out into the deeper waters of larger societal issues more often than you might suspect from the uber-hottie movie poster. It seems to work for most audience members: At press time, Blue Crush was the fifth largest grossing movie in the country, pulling in a total of $26.4 million, according to ACNielsen.

Blue Crush is a decent coming-of-age film for women, with the cultural savvy of a movie that can foreground the racial conflict simmering beneath the story of a white girl attempting to excel at a Pacific Islander’s sport — and eat its lite-’n’-fluffy, pop-culture cheesecake too, in the form of MTV-style surfing montages and a fairy tale ending.

Protagonist Anne Marie Chadwick (Kate Bosworth) lives to surf, but has to live off the chump change she makes changing sheets at a big Oahu hotel. As Blue Crush opens, she’s up early and ready to cruise out to the beach at the prospect of massive pipe on the island’s North Shore. We soon discover Anne Marie struggling against getting swept away by the undertow of her past — she got a nasty knock on the noggin after a brutal wipeout and has been shying away from big waves ever since. Since her absentee mother walked out, she’s also getting swallowed up in the task of having to play parent to her younger sister, Penny (Mika Boorem).

Friends Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake) both support and pressure Anne Marie. They push her to compete at the Pipe Masters, a surf competition at Pipeline, the beach with the biggest crests and best surfing — and the site of Anne Marie’s near-fatal accident. Another distraction: a vacationing pro football quarterback who asks Anne Marie for surf lessons and more, eliciting commentary from her chums like, “Oh, so you’re going pro ho?” and “Is he going to pay for your implants?”

As women’s sports movies go, this one is a decent slice of genre filmmaking, a crossover that appeals to teen girls hungry for empowering images, teen boys and male adults itching to check out some bikini-ed babes (thankfully free of Baywatch-style jiggle) and sports fans eager for visceral thrills and X-treme inside-the-wave shots. The general dearth of female-oriented sports films makes Blue Crush’s competitive edge come as a pleasant surprise. Yeah, ultimately it’s about competing against yourself, not against other girls for some guy, but it’s probably the most entertaining film since tough chick Rodriguez’s debut, Girl Fight.

Blue Crush is also more hep to some fundamental issues swirling around Hawaiian Island culture, surfing or otherwise, as befits a story based on a magazine article by respected New Yorker writer and The Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean.

The film touches on realism when the girls trade their string bikinis for goofy maid outfits and go to work taking out trash, scrubbing toilets and peeling condoms off the floor as hotel housekeepers. And the general upshot of tourism, extending beyond the dirty linens, is the native folk’s revenge on the clueless tourists who whip through town simply to get their kicks: the scene in which Anne Marie and the quarterback meet up with the tattooed, thuggish quasi-Hawaiian surfers who tell the football player that the beach is for “locals only” — read: no whiteys, honkies or haolis — and rough him up for calling them “bro” rather than “bra.”

Which brings up some of the problems in the film. Lake, the Japanese-Hawaiian-English daughter of a female surfer and a Kauai native, may provide some of Blue Crush’s local cred — and lead thug Chris Taloa has surfed on film in the past in Endless Summer 2 — but about two characters, tops, speak with anything resembling a pidgin accent. And where is the rest of Hawai‘i’s huge Asian population in this film? Apart from Lake and the occasional cute little girl who asks the blonde pro surfer for an autograph, there’s none to be found, destroying what little gritty realism Blue Crush conjures. Between the accents, or lack thereof, the local thugs that look like long-lost members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Michelle Rodriguez’s angry, clearly urban ’tude, a viewer can be forgiven for thinking they had found themselves were lost in, say, Long Beach rather than Oahu’s Sandy Beach.

And why is it that the merry band of surfer girls’ hotel housekeeping supervisor is the most clearly “Asian” of the bunch, with her bob, heavy eyeliner and vaguely Chinese or Japanese accent? She’s viewed as one of the clear villains of the piece when she fires Anne Marie after the surfer takes a particularly feisty stand against the hotel guests’ rudeness. The message here? Asian Islanders are either sidekicks, sticks-in-the-mud or groundlings who look up to the white goddesses of surfing.

So despite the best intentions, the fact that Bosworth, rather than Lake, is cast as the lead in this surf flick marks it as a throwback — even as it strives to promote progressive, positive female perspectives on other fronts. Tellingly, the film casts racial issues underlying, for instance, the “locals only” beach scenes and Anne Marie’s struggles with surfing itself, as gender, class and psychological conflicts rather than probing the complex racial subtexts. Those waters are too deep, too dangerous, for even the most intrepid haoli surfer girl. It’s better to stick closer to the surface, her surfing USA dreams of competitions, magazine covers and, best of all, those lucrative sponsorships.

There’s still a walloping challenge out there for Island filmmakers: Apart from documentaries such as Endless Summer, the real story of Hawaiian surfing still needs to be told. The grandaddy of modern surfing and Olympic gold medallist Duke Paoa Kahanamoku (who actually did time himself as a Hollywood actor) rates a U.S. postage stamp this year, but his story really begs to be translated to celluloid. So I’m waiting, watching for that surf flick, a hybrid of the glossy, entertaining La Bamba and visionary, indigenously produced Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), made by and for Pacific Islanders. I’m sure there’s others waiting to catch that wave.