Many thanks to @lizzo2013 for tweeting the link to the site twitter.
Robbie Collins has posted an article on Point Break on The Telegraph. It takes an in depth look at the film and how it came to be Kathryn Bigelow’s project. The film was originally slated to be directed by Ridley Scott with Matthew Broderick as Johnny Utah and Charlie Sheen as Bodhi. After the production fell through another four years passed before Bigelow latched on to it. Here are a few interesting quotes:
Johnny Utah was as all-American as heroes come: a jock turned lawman, with a name inspired by the legendary quarterback Joe Montana. But played by Reeves, he was more beautiful than handsome, with a puppyish charm, and a poignant awareness of his own emotional blind spots.
Look out, for instance, for the almost indiscernible drop into slow-motion in the sequence where Johnny showers at the beach: it’s one of the stealthiest phwoars in modern cinema.
It’s unlikely that a male director would have had the nerve for this – or that two more established male stars, with hard-won hard-man reputations to defend, would have thrown themselves into it with quite so much gusto. In a promotional interview, Swayze described the film as being miles from “slap-ass, macho, jokey crap…I wanted to play it like a love story between two men.”
But it was only ten years later, with the success of The Fast and the Furious – a car-based Point Break remake in all but name – that brotherly love and beautiful men had become ingrained in action-movie culture.
It’s a really good read.