Movie Review: Blue Crush

By Chris Parry

Good grief. Either women have hideously low standards or Hollywood wouldn't know female empowerment if it smacked it in the face. What is it with all these movies dealing with 'female empowerment' that rely on jiggling breasts and skimpy clothing to get an audience? It wasn't long ago that we were being told that Coyote Ugly was all about female empowerment, when in actual fact it was about wetting your T-shirt down, dancing on a bar and getting dollars thrust down your G-string. Before that we had Striptease, about a mom ready to go to any lengths to keep her kids fed. Hmm, funny, all we remember about that one is Demi Moore's cans. Well, Pretty Woman was about female empowerment, right? I mean, Julia Roberts may have been a whore, but at least she got bought some cool stuff! Not going to fly? Okay, well what about Showgirls! That was surely about female empowerment! Well, about as much as Blue Crush is...

Honest to God, how come every movie about female empowerment uses gorgeous girls in every single role? Where's the ugly girl getting the guy? Where's the geeky chick in the chemistry club winning the Nobel Prize? How come every single female 'scientist' in movies has to be a Nicole Kidman or Mira Sorvino or Elizabeth Shue? Where are the truly empowered women - the doctors and lawyers and computer scientists? Why is it that, in order to be empowered, a girl has to dance on a bar, be a hooker, or ride a wave in a skimpy bikini?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I dig the whole breast thing, I'm a fan of the flesh as much as the next guy, but why not just come out and say "this is a movie about girls in bikinis who surf a lot?" Why not admit that the target audience is, in actual fact, teenage boys? Why gussy it up like a two dollar hooker going to the King's ball? You ain't fooling anyone here, sistahs, we know you're shallow.

Here's the thing; women are empowered when they use their heads. Riding a wave when common sense tells you it's a dumb thing to do remains a dumb thing to do. When a movie is trying to tell you that riding a wave is more important than school, we're a long way from empowering a generation - we've moved towards the gradual destruction of it.

In actual fact, if you were to swap the surfboards for bartops, Blue Crush is Coyote Ugly - only with smaller chests and awful music. The story is the same, the performances are as bad, the script is every bit as awful and underdone. It's a surf movie, people, not an intellectual study on how girls can be anything they strive for.

To bother you with storyline would be to waste your precious time, something you need not do by renting this mess of a movie. Suffice it to say that a surfer broad wants to ride a big wave, but everytime she falls off a board she has flashbacks about a near drowning and her loudmouth mom, so she doesn't know if she can do it. And she gets laid and orders room service (wow, it is like Pretty Woman!) and loses her job because she's an arrogant ass (who really deserved to lose her job, truth be told). Of course, in the end everything is wonderful, but you never for one second are led to expect anything but a happy ending in this rose-colored bikini-a-thon. It is to female empowerment what the Patch Adams courtroom scene was to drama.

In fact, if we're to believe the morals and ethics and ideals on display here, if your kid sister is in a nightclub instead of school, smoking weed and downing hooch while some homeboy surf-bum grabs her tang, if she tells you to leave her alone, you should, and then you should go surfing and blow a football player. Yeah, follow that dream, kids!

Sure, the surf photography is great, but being as it's used in place of dialogue and meaningful storyline, it only serves to grate after a while. That's probably for the best though, being as the dialogue consists of lines this bad: "You're fired, you can pick up your last paycheck next week - Surf's up, Maryanne." With scintillating repartee like that, you'd be expected to assume that this thing was written by non-English-speaking Ugandan refugees but sadly actual real-life English-speaking people wrote this garbola. And they got paid for it. Paid more than your local doctor makes in a year, no doubt.

Ladies, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling all empowered. I'm going to get my kid sister addicted to crystal meth, nail a football player, quit school, quit my job, and then go surf. Hollywood tells me it will all be better if I just do that.

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