Kathryn Bigelow's NEAR DARK & POINT BREAK (Contemp. Revival)

Portage Theater - Thursday, 7:30pm (Dark) and 9:30pm (Break)
As a director Kathryn Bigelow exists in that strange place where she is respected by her peers and critics, enjoys a cult following of movie buffs, but has yet to gain mainstream name recognition. A woman who is best known for her work in the traditionally masculine genres of Action, Sci-Fi, and Horror, she consistently makes good films that don't earn quite enough at the box office. Her 2009 feature, THE HURT LOCKER, a story about the members of a US army bomb squad in Iraq that has won numerous awards at film festivals worldwide, has sparked a renewed interest in her earlier work and a chance to reassess her importance as a contemporary auteur. In NEAR DARK (1987, 94 min, 35mm), which Bigelow also co-scripted, tropes of the Western genre are combined with a Vampire story, set on the late 1980s Great Plains. From the opening scene of Caleb, our Oklahoma farm boy protagonist, driving to town in his beat-up truck for a night of beer and girls, to the final battle between humans and the undead, there is rarely a plot twist. Instead, Bigelow sets a scene and lets our expectations of the genre do the rest. Outside of Caleb and the Vamp who turns him, there is a minimum of character development and explanation. The word "Vampire" is never used in the film, and when our hero gets up on his horse for the first time, we know the good guys will win. At the core, Caleb's human family is pitted against the outcast Vampire family that takes him in, and Bigelow continues this theme in her 1991 studio debut, POINT BREAK (1991, 120 min, 35mm). Southern California has suffered a string of bank robberies, and a rookie FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) follows his veteran partner's hunch that the criminals are also surfers. Reeves goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, led by Patrick Swayze, and falls in love with their thrill-seeking lifestyle and Swayze's live for the moment philosophy. Reeves is finally accepted as one of the boys, and when his cover is blown he is forced to make a choice between the lost-boys family of surfers and his responsibility as a lawman. Featuring extended sequences of surfing and skydiving, POINT BREAK uses these narrative asides to increase the suspense of its crime genre core. Again, extended explanations of the two worlds are never provided, giving the story the economy of convention to explore itself. JH - Cine-File.info