BIG WEDNESDAY (John Milius, 1978) R

Reviewed: July 24, 2002

John Milius's surfing while coming-of-age flick isn't profound, but has enough verve and imagination to provide a nice reprieve from the usual tedium of its tired genre.

Handily divided into four segments (spanning a total of 12 years, each beginning with a hilariously melodramatic voice-over from Joe Who The Fuck Are You) and labeled according to the season (obvious guide: summer = innocence, fall = change, winter = despair, spring = renewal), Milius vividly sketches a trio of friends. These are: Jan-Michael Vincent as a renown surfer then living in the boozing shadow of his former success, Gary Busey as an insane masochist (I assume he's playing himself), and William Katt as Mr. More Responsible Than His Other Two Friends.

Milius supplies the pic with an important sense of forward momentum, and what he lacks in genuine emotion, he more than makes up for with constant fun (a killer soundtrack, huge parties, fist fights, food fights, sadomasochism, hot girls and of course, lots of surfing).

There are massive, astounding stretches of celluloid where Milius does nothing except watch his characters battle the waves. Working with cinematographer Bruce Surtees (son of the legendary cinematographer Robert Surtees), Milius's sun/water drenched visuals are unlike anything I've ever seen. Since Big Wednesday was made decades before the breakthrough FX used on a recent ocean peril film like The Perfect Storm were available, I was often left flummoxed as to just how the hell Milius achieved his shots. There are staggering "tumbling underwater" shots, mind-blowing "being enveloped by waves" shots (POV = underneath the towering wave right before it breaks), miraculously thrilling aerial shots... it's all enough to make you wanna quit your job, buy a board and trek West. (The vast majority, if not all, of Big Wednesday's waterworks were shot on location.)

Pic could benefit from stronger acting, but what's there is acceptable (save a ridiculously over the top performance from Sam Melville as old-man, surfing-guru, "Bear"). Milius excels at smaller asides rather than big moments and appropriately scales Big Wednesday with the former weighing heavier than the latter.

Warner Bros' recent DVD release of Big Wednesday features a gorgeous cinemascope transfer. This is a movie with a potent sense of locale and California's rarely looked this beautiful on film.

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