'Blue Crush'
Going into \Blue Crush,"" one cannot help but compare it to other surf related media outlets, namely the movie ""Point Break"" and those episodes of ""Saved by the Bell"" when the gang worked at a beach house for the summer. Thankfully, ""Blue Crush"" has nothing in common with either the former or the latter. Instead ""Blue Crush"" offers a fresh and relatively accurate view on the surf sub-culture that dominates the island state: Hawaii.
The movie begins with Ann Marie and her surfer roommates/best buddies, surfing the North Shore of Oahu. This sequence is only the first of many incredible surfing sequences throughout the entire movie. The water camera operator, Don King, and director John Stockwell approached the filming of this movie with an impressive degree of professionalism, and the end result of the surfing scenes is nothing short of excellent.
Kate Bosworth plays the character of Ann Marie, a talented young surfer who has the skills to ride all the way to a corporate sponsorship if her at-home problems don't leave her high and dry. Bosworth does a commendable job and exhibits a relaxed yet gritty characterization of Ann Marie.
Following her mother's abandonment of her and her sister, Ann Marie is forced to take a job as maid at one of the countless hotels dotting the Hawaiian beaches. Luckily for Ann Marie, she has her two surfing friends, Eden and Lena, to rely upon when things get rough. When Ann Marie is fired from the hotel for haranguing several sloppy, football playing guests; Eden comes up with the bright idea of offering surfing lessons to the football team. Not only do the surf lessons provide money for rent, as well as some of the more comical scenes in the flick, the lessons allow Ann Marie to become romantically involved with the hunky quarterback, Matt.
Suddenly Ann Marie finds herself training to be a trophy wife instead of training for the Pipe Masters surf contest trophy. At the heart of the film the movie calls for a climatic confrontation with Matt, where Ann Marie needs to set her sights on the real goal: winning the Pipe Masters.
For what the movie lacks in intriguing plot'it has a fairly predictable girl-meets-boy conflict-resolution get-back-together story sequence'the film makes up for it with incredible cinematography that deserves serious consideration for an Oscar nomination. To the actors' credit, they all exceed the expectatons of the script, most notably Sanoe Lake, a full-time surfer who delivers a nicely acted small role as Ann Marie's friend. Lake brings an amount of credibility to the scenes between her and Bosworth, and like the rest of the movie, certainly exceeds expectations to make ""Blue Crush"" an entertaining pleasure.
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'Possession'
""Possession"" follows the tale of two scholars, Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), tracking down the illicit forbidden romance of a 19th century poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and his lover, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle). In the vastness of the reading room of the London Library, Roland turns a page of a worn out old volume to reveal a hidden love letter from Ash to a Madam.
Finding help in women's studies professor Bailey, Michell turns his attention to the hidden life of Ash. As Michell and Bailey wind through both England and France searching for the next piece of the puzzle, Bailey's former flame Fergus Wolfe (Toby Stephens) and the essential Ash biographer Professor Blackadder (Tom Hickey) pursue them. Along the way, Michell and Bailey delve deeper into the love story of Ash and LaMotte, all the while writing their own.
As a love story, ""Possession"" is a double success. It moves with easy grace from the modern-day romance to the Victorian poets. Paltrow and Eckhart harvest an early, calculated sense of competition to bud into an intriguing collaboration. Meanwhile, over 100 years earlier, Northam and Ehle appear adequately repressed in their 1850s postures. The landscapes of the English countryside are sweepingly rendered, with the jade-green meadows serving as an ample backdrop to the tale. When the story moves to the hollows of Brittany, the shoreline reveals as much of the characters as it does of the countryside. With a trip to Yorkshire, the chill of the North Sea is felt; you could swear a light mist of sea salt blows down the theater isles.
The characters work best in pairs. Maud and Roland complement each other as witty academics throwing out easy evaluations of the other. Roland and Fergus keep a finely calibrated exchange of wisecracks rolling, with Roland playing out the poor-boy student pulling quick jokes on the snobbish Wolfe.
The problem, however, is Roland on his own. He's cast as an American, instantly setting himself apart from the otherwise English characters. Immediately, he's galvanized as somewhat of an outsider, the butt of more than a couple jokes. It would have been easier to bear a badly contrived accent on Eckhart's part than suffer jabs like, ""Where is Roland anyway?"" ""Oh, he's an American, probably out selling drugs or something.""
This flaw is more glaring, considering deviates most from the source of the movie, A.S. Byatt's novel. Considering it brought Byatt a Booker Prize, director Neil LaBute would be hard-pressed to match the book's scope.
Where Byatt assumes a Victorian style and lets loose a 555-page masterpiece that exhibits several points of view, LaBute's film has the opposite problem. He shortchanges the audience with only two stories and not even two hours worth of entertainment. While ""Possession"" might hold your attention for its chemistry, it loses its grip in its character.
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