since i'm unemployed and still unvaccinated, i have opened the 1991 movie POINT BREAK on HBO Max and will be livetweeting it minute by minute, one minute per day. the film is 123 minutes long
POINT BREAK min 001: Largo Entertainment, a studio named with the idea that we all know terms of musical direction, and prefer slow dignity. the soundtrack obliges: ambient over golden waves of surf. the names KEANU REEVES and PATRICK SWAYZE slide into each other, merging. hot
POINT BREAK min 002: the title words also meld, then clang apart. we now cut effortlessly between two himbos. one, a lithe shadow, rides the mighty ocean on his board. the second is pale, black-clad, drenched to his pecs by rain, shotgunning wooden cutouts from an autumn hayride
POINT BREAK min 003: music swells. note each himbo has his own water. Swayze: wild spray jeweled in the sun. Keanu: a dull gray downpour. he finishes off the targets to praise from a frankfurter-looking fed with a clipboard. right on cue, James Cameron's EP credit rolls across
POINT BREAK min 004: Sorkin ever done a cop walk-and-talk? no way he gets it as potent as the mean doctor from Scrubs telling Keanu to fuck off, 8 seconds into a job. K-Bigelow puts her name under that serenely chill face. no skin on his chicken: reject flavor, embrace the flesh—
POINT BREAK min 005: stats. percents. numbers are the essence of data. Keanu can't listen to that square guy shit without a sugar fix, so he grabs a toasted coconut donut. Dr. Scrubs accuses him of being full of cum, to which he's like, "and?" Guys without cum should relax a bit
POINT BREAK min 006: been too long since we've seen a shirtless man, so Bigelow gives us 20 of 'em next to a pool, including Gary Busey. he shit-talks Keanu as well, but more affably and while blindfolded. they'll get along great. say, what's Gary up to these days? glad you asked
POINT BREAK min 007: Busey bombs into the deep, but never mind, our female gaze is escalating: nips on a sculpted torso zipped into a kevlar vest. rubber-faced presidents storm a bank, Reagan doing social commentary, always the fucking showboat. he better not turn out to be cool
POINT BREAK 008: political schtick, hard to pull off when you're robbing a place. dunno how much is landing. Nixon feels forced, Carter underused, LBJ hogs the limelight with "we're stylin!" and a butt-graffiti camera-mooning. watching footage, Keanu wisely observes: "Nice moves"
POINT BREAK min 009: Keanu & Busey dissect the heist in a bank lobby that is now 87% blue haze. our crew never hits the vault—Ocean's reboot a decade away. Busey is more hung up on how he struck out at prom and every night since. young jock feds walk up to prey on his beta energy
POINT BREAK min 010: the compelling dissonance of seeing Keanu belittled, bitched at, groaned about. he gets no respect. and it hits you: "Keanu" doesn't exist in this universe—he's no screen god, only... Johnny Utah. the hardest part of his job will be overcoming that name.
POINT BREAK min 011: time for a workplace mediation strategy: radical dickishness. Keanu calls Busey a "burnout" with such a SoCal sneer you'd swear he was a surfer already. cops nearly throwing hands their first day as partners because of the primate hierarchy. your tax dollars
POINT BREAK min 012: fine camerawork shows extras afraid to interfere as the leads throb their forehead veins. yet in bro-ish tradition, the men decide not to topple each other into that canyon off Mulholland, and repair to the office for Coronas, Chinese food, discussion of wax
POINT BREAK min 013: it takes half a beer, a list of dates and a forensic clue out of CSI's rejected ideas to get Keanu "on board" with the surfer theory. or is he impressed by Busey's openness to kinky sex? between them remains that freeze-frame butt, symbol of their cheeky bond
POINT BREAK min 014: lads are so gung-ho in their drunk office cowabunga game that it's jarring to see Keanu then roasted as an elderly poser by a child with a butt-cut (callback to last scene). he tries to recover with a ~chill dude voice~ .weird to hear him do a self-impression
POINT BREAK min 015: "how hard can it be?" Busey asks before pissing off to a whiskey lunch. slam on Keanu, fucking around and finding out: the aquamarine crush of the wipeout is unrelenting, our boy trapped under foaming clouds, a liquid sky. press F to pay respects to his board
POINT BREAK min 016: soundtrack goes orchestral, holy, to match the miracle of rescue. a woman hauls Keanu to the surface. his curvy, wetsuited rump sparkles in sun as he gasps for air. once she tosses him ashore, though, it's nag, nag, nag! even a drowning man is not truly free
POINT BREAK min 017: at the trim brunette stranger he is able to moan his preposterous in-universe name. she asks who cares. (the answer is us, the audience.) after a last good ride, she changes in the parking lot as a fully dried-off Keanu stalks her to contemporary alt rock
POINT BREAK min 018: no call for surveillance in meatspace; once dreamgirl wriggles into cutoffs and rolls out, it's back to the lab to ogle her record with a computer lady who *really* wants to be one of the boys. Keanu is turned on to see that his future wife's parents are dead
POINT BREAK min 019: using /dead zone\\ abilities, Keanu steers himself to Neptune's Net, presumably the dustiest day of the year, just to keep hitting on Lori Petty. she gives him a familiar eyeball but can't condone his tourist order of shrimp and fries. also his shirt fits nice
POINT BREAK min 020: Petty gives Keanu his order number, and you can tell he doesn't care, because he's winding up this big lie about his parents dying, and man, i hate knowing that more than one dude has tried this in real life. i bet he's not even hungry, for fuck's sake. shit!
POINT BREAK min 021: really, Keanu? "I've never seen the ocean before"? you talk like you were born there. like a fucking mer-man! this isn't convincing, but then, Petty realizes he's hot. shy laughter. by the morning lesson, she's partly regained her senses and begins to dom him
POINT BREAK min 022: in fewer than sixty seconds, we float from Keanu's first dry efforts to a semi-knack for riding the curl. as western sun dances over this fun, in a hundred kinds of gold—he learns. and lives. Bigelow gets the water in ways James Cameron never will. i'm happy
POINT BREAK min 023: turns out Keanu still has that wack board. it functions well with a dose of sexual chemistry—he and Petty mug and splash at each other like teen lifeguards who stole mozzarella sticks from the snack bar. right as he becomes normal, he sees his Jungian shadow,
POINT BREAK min 024: the dark himbo has complete control. he folds himself into the breaks like no one else has ever belonged there. and actually... he's right. it's tidal sex. "What's he searching for," Keanu asks, and you can tell he's disappointed when the answer isn't: "You."
POINT BREAK min 025: uh-oh. the boys are tossing the pigskin. Swayze is doing little flirt-scares on Petty. they're speaking "in private" like 3 feet away from Keanu, who blots his face with a tiny towel in consternation. only way he can save face is, yep, going full quarterback.
POINT BREAK min 026: all right, Bigelow says, i know you're ready to see them strapping himbos take each other down in the sand. truck headlights cast eerie glow on the beach, and through long tossing hair. huts. grunts. growls. moans. could it be... are the men... communicating?
POINT BREAK min 027: bruising match. Swayze has ball. Keanu barrels through six musclebois to reach him, making meaty contact. robust defense for a pickup team tho? the takedown happens in the tide baby, that's where we get more backstory also. you see, he used to be even;better;
POINT BREAK min 028: lol @ "lawyers don't surf!" as if rich guys don't colonize everything cool. Keanu thinks he's charmed Swayze. (it's the other way around..) he and Busey face a premature upbraiding from furious John C. McGinley for stopping at PacSun on the way to work, again
POINT BREAK 029: McGinley's blood pressure spikes due to shirtsleeves rolled up to his armpits. Keanu goes for Zen defense, which backfires as intended. Busey is one of the last characters to plausibly stress-smoke a cigar. they seek the computer babe for graphic interference,
POINT BREAK 030: the '90s science is ~off the charts~. could clone a dinosaur from the chemicals they pull off a hair. (scene is good with Cocteau Twins' 'Carolyn's Fingers' played loudly over.) Keanu hotter and hotter. Busey, thrilled, visits Dockweiler Beach to steal more hair.
POINT BREAK min 031: while Busey has a standard pig routine of brazen civil rights violations, Keanu, testing a new subgenre of accent, pranks a "brah." lab nerd says this hard work has paid off with a match: check out a beach, that, per Keanu, has a "nice point break."[pointing]
POINT BREAK min 032: the rides may be long and workable, just not with a flotilla of jacked bros hewing to a system of wave ownership that's mildly corrupt at best. Busey ogles through binoculars as if at co-eds while Keanu stands up to be sliced down by a local Poseidon figure.
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