Luke Collins
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036613
- eISBN:
- 9780252093661
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter analyzes the quintessential action movie, Point Break (1991), arguing that we experience the film as generic surface. Despite critical efforts to construct the film as a creative play ...
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This chapter analyzes the quintessential action movie, Point Break (1991), arguing that we experience the film as generic surface. Despite critical efforts to construct the film as a creative play with masculinity or with the action genre, the film remains culturally and politically ambivalent. As is often noted, Point Break repeats the “vessel” of the action genre without rupture, spillage, or slippage. In this sense, Point Break expresses an awareness of its cultural/commercial form by filling out the homosocial trope latent in the action genre's intense male relationships and fetishization of the male body. However, at no point does it seek to exceed, parody, ironize, or reflect upon its genre. The fullness that this produces is a flatness: a surface. This surface is not a negative construction but provides a way to address the network of relations between film, audience, and industry.Less
This chapter analyzes the quintessential action movie, Point Break (1991), arguing that we experience the film as generic surface. Despite critical efforts to construct the film as a creative play with masculinity or with the action genre, the film remains culturally and politically ambivalent. As is often noted, Point Break repeats the “vessel” of the action genre without rupture, spillage, or slippage. In this sense, Point Break expresses an awareness of its cultural/commercial form by filling out the homosocial trope latent in the action genre's intense male relationships and fetishization of the male body. However, at no point does it seek to exceed, parody, ironize, or reflect upon its genre. The fullness that this produces is a flatness: a surface. This surface is not a negative construction but provides a way to address the network of relations between film, audience, and industry.
James Clarke
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231169776
- eISBN:
- 9780231850629
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231169776.003.0010
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter discusses a number of feature film projects that James Cameron developed as a writer and producer. While writing the screenplay for Aliens (1986), Cameron had also been commissioned to ...
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This chapter discusses a number of feature film projects that James Cameron developed as a writer and producer. While writing the screenplay for Aliens (1986), Cameron had also been commissioned to write what became the original draft of the sequel to First Blood (1982), entitled Rambo: The Mission (1985). In the early 1990s, Cameron was attached to write and direct a new film adaptation of Stan Lee's Marvel Comics character, Spider-Man. He also wrote the screenplays of Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), and created the television series Dark Angel in 2000, starring Jessica Alba. He later produced Solaris (2001), Sanctum (2011), and a film presentation of a live Cirque du Soleil show in 2011.Less
This chapter discusses a number of feature film projects that James Cameron developed as a writer and producer. While writing the screenplay for Aliens (1986), Cameron had also been commissioned to write what became the original draft of the sequel to First Blood (1982), entitled Rambo: The Mission (1985). In the early 1990s, Cameron was attached to write and direct a new film adaptation of Stan Lee's Marvel Comics character, Spider-Man. He also wrote the screenplays of Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), and created the television series Dark Angel in 2000, starring Jessica Alba. He later produced Solaris (2001), Sanctum (2011), and a film presentation of a live Cirque du Soleil show in 2011.
