Hacker Cinema
Point Break
1991 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
In Los Angeles, a gang of bank robbers who call themselves The Ex-Presidents commit their crimes while wearing masks of Reagan, Carter, Nixon and Johnson. Believing that the members of the gang could be surfers, the F.B.I. sends young agent Johnny Utah to the beach undercover to mix with the surfers and gather information.
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17 comments on Hacker News
Point Break ? Might as well watch Hackers (1995) to learn about hacking the Gibson.
Tim Bonython is one of many with better surfing content: https://www.youtube.com/@SURFINGVISIONS/videos
Breath (2017) is arguably a better surf movie, as are others.
I feel the same about GTA V. When I'm driving, and the sunset comes, and the song "Pure Shores" starts to play, I really start to get shivers. Somehow with this game they captured some of the vibe of California, and related movies (HEAT, Point Break).
Best bank heist scene in any movie.
Other favorites include The Dark Knight’s opening, and as far as escaping a bank robbery goes, Baby Driver’s opening chase was 10/10 (even though a Subaru couldn’t do what he was doing but I’m willing to let that go).
The Town and the original Point Break have great ones as well.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
I came here to say this. The Seattle Public Affairs director said:
"They are showing up to verify everyone is safe, not showing up with the assumption that this is Point Break"
Why would they ever show up assuming that this is Point Break? The implication is extremely concerning. That kind of event happens so rarely it should never be an assumption. And that movie was even about a bank heist, not a response to someone's house.
There is a severe disconnect between US police officer's view of their job, and the reality (queue that grid meme, what other people think I do, what I think I do, etc). Their on the job fatality rate is half that of sanitation workers picking up trash from the curb. It is one tenth that of logging workers. They're tied for the 14th most dangerous job with electrical power line installers. From https://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-2018-7#6-structural-iron-and-steel-workers-29 which uses Labor Bureau stats.
> It's still not public domain - but nobody knows who should be angry at you if you broadcast.
Point Break (1991) is a good example of this.
Here's an article from someone who wanted to show it at a festival and couldn't work out the rights.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/point-break-not-coming-cinema-near-you
US content is much deeper than UK, most likely due to (a) operating for longer in that market and (b) better economics for going hunting for licencing rights for not-even-that-long long-tail content.
In case anyone hasn't seen it, here's an eye-opening post from someone at the British Film Institite, explaining the rediculous lengths they had to go to just to do a screening of Kathryn Bigelow's "Point Break"
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/point-break-not-coming-cinema-near-you
(and the follow up when they eventually managed to get rights to show the movie)
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/point-break-quest-rights-kathryn-bigelow
Point Break was a documentary?? I'll be damned...
See for example the original Point Break.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/point-break-not-coming-cinema-near-you
Great to hear you've had a good time here Andrew!
I feel the need to add...
Melbourne does have great surf beaches within about 1-2 hours’ drive: Bells Beach (which hosts an annual World Surf League tournament [1] and was depicted - falsely - in the 1991 Patrick Swayze & Keanu Reeves movie Point Break [2]), Jan Juc and Fairhaven on the west coast; Gunnamatta, Point Leo, Cape Woolamai to the east.
These beaches can offer world-class surfing for serious surfers.
However, the weather is quite cold in winter and it's not a tropical climate, so they're not very pretty beaches and not much fun for ordinary leisure beachgoers, except for the warmer months of December to March.
The beaches in Sydney and further up the East Coast to Far North Queensland are much more pretty, and for much more of the year, as are those in Perth and up the Western Australian coast.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Curl_Pro
[2] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#safe=off&q=What+beach+was+Point+Break+filmed+at%3F
> EBooks are in the cloud; you can never actually lose one forever. Just buy it again, which is very, very likely to be cheaper than photocopying a paper book.
In 2012 I bought some music in electronic format from Amazon. A bit later they introduced the Amazon music service. I looked in my purchased music section, and the music I'd bought in 2012 wasn't there, and if I lose the downloaded files it's not available to me unless I buy it again or the rights holders come to some agreement with Amazon.
It's possible that stuff will drop out of the cloud when the rights become impossible to work out. I'm not sure how likely that is with books, but it happens with films. The most well known is "Point Break", which now can't be shown in public by cinemas because no-one knows who owns the rights.
Got to say, I haven't seen it, mostly because I know I would hate it. But one of my friends told me that they are destroying a death star. Again. For the 3rd time. Seriously? How many times are they gonna try?
"One can envision Hollywood eventually turning out only two products: "Star Wars" movies and James Bond movies, each periodically "rebooted" for a new generation of customers."
Absolutely love the conclusion. This is exactly what is happening right now. It's like every single new movie is a reboot. Mad Max, Ghostbusters, Robocop, Point Break, The neverending story...
There's some background on where the piece came from here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/female-film-reporter-competition-results
But the specifics of the author's case don't really matter all that much. "Screening" means she wants to show it to the public, and since Point Break is a copyrighted work, that's not something you can do without the permission of the copyright holder (see http://www.prattlibrary.org/locations/sightsandsounds/?id=11096).
The point of the article is that in many cases, finding someone who can actually give you that permission is insanely difficult or even impossible, as the rights for a property pass from company to company over years of deals and mergers and bankruptcies. It can get so complicated that eventually nobody knows who actually owns the rights anymore, turning the property into an "orphan work" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works). This results in a Catch-22: you can't exhibit the work without the permission of the rightsholder, but since nobody knows anymore who the rightsholder is, there's no practical way for you to get that permission. So the work floats in limbo, inaccessible to the public unless you're willing to break the law.
I honestly had a hard time following this - who is this person and why are they "screening" Point Break? Is this for a paid cinema and they need to secure these rights, or is it a private thing and the person is being anal retentive about the legalities? Perhaps theres some context I'm missing here?
All I can offer is this: Three separate sites that have the script[1][2] (or a transcription[3] of the movie) all fail to have that quote. None of them even contain the word "imaginary" and only two (the scripts, not the transcription) have the word "religion" once but in a scene description and not as dialogue. I should note that the two scripts seem to be the same. (Although who really knows where they got it. One could just copy the other.) But both are different than the transcript.
[1] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Point-Break.html [2] http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/pointbreak.html [3] http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/p/point-break-script-transcript-keanu.html
According to IMDB, and other websites, in the movie, "Point Break", Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is attributed with the following:
Wars of religion always make me laugh because basically you're fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.[1]
However, I have not heard this quote spoken by any character within the movie. And a quick web search of a variation of the quote attributes it to "anonymous". Does anyone know if this quote was actually spoken in the movie "Point Break"?
1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102685/quotes?item=qt1561818
And Bodhi was the name of Patrick Swayze's character in "Point Break", so in a mind of a movie geek it makes total sense to think of this distro as Linux for (web) surfers...