Review of Windrider

Windrider (1986)
6/10
How To Do A 360.
13 December 2014
Warning: Spoilers
Maybe I shouldn't be writing this because I only watched the first half before realizing that it wasn't my kind of movie. However, it might be someone's else's, someone who enjoys beach party movies with plots, actions, some wit, and a teen-aged Nicole Kidman.

Burlinson is a computer engineer or something at his dad's company. He comes up with a design for a theme park built around artificial waves. The surfers will go ape. They'll all try to do a "360," which I gather is flipping your sailboard around in a complete circle in the air above a breaking wave. That's a guess. Whatever it is, it has to be done on a sailboard and it's difficult.

Burlinson manages to pull it off one afternoon but nobody is around to see him except the distant figure of Kidman. Burlinson's mates in the pub ridicule him so he sets out on a search for Kidman, who is a rock queen. She gets to sing an entire fast pop song, her voice almost buried in electronic percussion and guitars, all bathed in a blood-red light. You can see why it requires a certain taste to enjoy this past the point of no return.

I wondered, while listening to the airy and up-tempo dialog, if American kids will get some of the allusions and jokes. Burlinson's nickname is "PC". It stands for "Police Car." Why is he called that? Because he's always chasing sirens. Sirens? Worse yet, somebody quotes Voltaire.

However, I expect that the sensibilities of our teens will roughly discard these sorts of challenges because by the time they realize that they didn't understand it, they'll have already forgotten it.

Besides, the dialog won't be as important as the many surfing scenes, the amiably reckless attitude of Burlinson, and the sassy, brassy Kidman, who was only eighteen when this was shot. She has a head of curly black hair that flops around with her, big enough to have its own weather system. She's a lot of fun. She hadn't been turned into the epitome of vacuous blond perfection that Hollywood would do it's best to achieve, but she can act and she embodies the role.

There are amusing allusions to "Jaws" in the writing -- not just the dialog -- some often amusing. Just as often, it's not. I didn't get a kick out of watching Burlinson prepare a fast breakfast while the camera cuts back and forth from the frying egg to the countdown on the microwave. It wasn't offensive, just pointless.
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