Blue Crush

At first glance, this movie looks like a teen movie with good-looking people in bikinis among nice scenery. But it examines some interesting cultural themes. Surfer culture has a reputation for being laid back and easy going. This reputation is only partl y true.

The movie is about Anne Marie Chadwick (Kate Bosworth) and her two women friends and little sister who live in Hawaii. The three friends are surfer girls who wake up before dawn to the radio surf report. If there is a good surf, they load their boards on their beat-up car and head for the beach. They make a living in minimum-wage jobs as maids in a resort hotel.

One theme is the lower-class jobs of these women. It is rather rare for a recent movie to include a view of a service-industry job and the personal insults that are involved in it. (Remember, these kinds of jobs are the growth sector of the current economy.) In one memorable scene, the women have to clean a room that was left in a complete wreck. They find a used condom on the floor, and Anne Marie indignantly marches out to the beach to find the person responsible.

That act gets her fired from the job, but she gets the attention of a pro football quarterback. He hires Anne Marie and her friends to give him surfing lessons, and that leads to dating. He spends money on her, and she begins to turn into a trophy vacat ion girlfriend. Her friends are dismayed that she would turn her back on training for a surfing competition to be pampered in a hotel room that she used to have to clean. Anne Marie must make a choice to leave the life of ease in order to train.

In any movie of this genre, the climax is the Big Competition, in this case the Pipe Masters surfing competition. Another twist in this movie is that the goal is not really to win. Rather, Anne Marie must ovecome her fear. In a previous competition, she was thrown off her board, hit her head on a reef, and almost drowned. Her ability to overcome her fear is the real victory.

The movie shows, by remarkable surfer's-eye camera angles, the physically dangerous side of surfing. In one sequence, Anne Marie is pounded under breaking waves against the underwater reef, struggling to get to the surface for a breath in between waves. The interestin g thing about surfing as a sport is the luck of catching the "perfect wave" and being able to ride it, as a competition against nature, rather than the competition against the other people.

The movie is rated PG-13, and is available on video or DVD.

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