Blue Crush
Director: John StockwellThe audio delivery on DVDs has been an erratic affair. A number of major films with grand sound mixes have come out blandly. There are no overt flaws-you can still turn up the volume and catch all the major moments-but the sound is just there, supporting the movie instead of reaching out and pulling you into it. Hence, when a DVD comes along that does have an energized soundtrack, it is worth overlooking some of the movie's flaws to experience thrills that ought to be more commonplace than they are.
Universal didn't even bother to give the Widescreen Collector's Edition of Blue Crush (22132, $20) a DTS track, something they have provided on many less worthy programs, but no matter, the 5.1-channel Dolby Digital track rocks. The front separations and rear channel activity are highly pronounced, and the film's sound mix is smartly designed. You're sure you're going to get wet every time the characters are anywhere near water. Set in Hawaii, the film is about a young female surfer, attractively played by Kate Bosworth, who is trying to overcome the psychological effects of an accident in time for a big contest. She also meets a pro football quarterback and has a romance. The film's advertising has emphasized her friendship with two other female surfers, but that is misleading since it is a subplot used to contrast the romance and give her a bigger rooting section during the contest. There are minor convolutions and illogical story points, though no more so than in most any happy-go-lucky surfing movie from the past, and the surfing footage is super, but even before the opening corporate logos appear, it is the movie's sound mix that puts you in the pipe and keeps you there, an awesome ride on an unexpected wave.
The letterboxing has an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The colors are bright and the image is crisp. The 105-minute film has alternate French and Spanish audio tracks in 5.1 Dolby, optional English subtitles, a cast & crew profile section, text essays about the film and about surfing, a trailer, a Lenny Kravitz music video, a 5-minute piece about the film's wardrobes, a 2-minute piece about female surfing, a 3-minute demo reel put together to sell the film to Universal with optional narration by director John Stockwell, a 2-minute collection of skateboarding footage shot for use in the film again with optional commentary by Stockwell, 7 minutes of unused surfing footage with optional commentary by Stockwell ("Rochelle [Ballard] got more time at Pipe than I think she'd ever had before. It's so crowded out there and it's such a sort of wolfpack, it's hard for a girl, even the number one girls in the world, to get waves."), a 4-minute segment with optional commentary by Stockwell that looks at how the surfing shots were captured (during the film, you can often see the cameramen inside the waves), a 14-minute production documentary that emphasizes how the film's creators embraced the surfing community for help on the film, and 19 minutes of deleted scenes that enhance character but would have slowed the pace of the film considerably.
The deleted scenes also feature a commentary by Stockwell, and Stockwell supplies one of the two commentary tracks for the film itself. He shares many production details and discusses the elaborate challenges the film presented, particularly how, for the surfing sequences, they basically had to shoot whatever they could get whenever the surf was up, and do their best to adjust the continuity later on. "One thing we did on this film was we used a digital inter-negative, so we were able to time the whole movie digitally, and that allowed us to match certain sequences where we'd be shooting in one direction and it would be sunny, and we'd turn around to shoot the other angle and it'd be cloudy. If we had stopped and waited for the sun to clear we would have gone, you know, eight weeks over schedule and $20 million over budget, but thankfully we were able to kind of repair things in the digital timing process."
The second commentary features Bosworth and fellow actresses Michelle Rodriguez and Sanoe Lake. They chatter away without pause, exchanging anecdotes about the shoot, commenting upon the film from a young female perspective and reminiscing about their experiences. Although the talk defies the film's 'PG-13' rating in places, they clearly enjoy one another's company and it is an appealing gabfest.
