Windrider (1986)

Purely Joyful Movie!

People are voting emotionally.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It seems like they made a movie like this for every cool activity in the 80s, and since windsurfing was at the height of its popularity it got the treatment too. Think Top Gun with much lower stakes and one tenth the budget. Despite a bad script and some marginal acting, I actually enjoyed this movie. Forget about the cliché plot and you can actually get a kick out of the clothes and hair and all the other 80s elements. The film is shot in Australia so for an American it was fun to pick out the cultural differences as well. Also, Nicole Kidman stars as a rock star, putting on a good performance and giving the film an excuse to fill the soundtrack with some era appropriate synth cheese. The windsurfing scenes will only appeal to the real hard core since the sport has changed so much in the last couple decades, but again I enjoyed the look back.

Maybe I shouldn't be writing this because I only watched the first half before realizing that it wasn't my kind of movie. However, it might be someone's else's, someone who enjoys beach party movies with plots, actions, some wit, and a teen-aged Nicole Kidman.Burlinson is a computer engineer or something at his dad's company. He comes up with a design for a theme park built around artificial waves. The surfers will go ape. They'll all try to do a "360," which I gather is flipping your sailboard around in a complete circle in the air above a breaking wave. That's a guess. Whatever it is, it has to be done on a sailboard and it's difficult.Burlinson manages to pull it off one afternoon but nobody is around to see him except the distant figure of Kidman. Burlinson's mates in the pub ridicule him so he sets out on a search for Kidman, who is a rock queen. She gets to sing an entire fast pop song, her voice almost buried in electronic percussion and guitars, all bathed in a blood-red light. You can see why it requires a certain taste to enjoy this past the point of no return.I wondered, while listening to the airy and up-tempo dialog, if American kids will get some of the allusions and jokes. Burlinson's nickname is "PC". It stands for "Police Car." Why is he called that? Because he's always chasing sirens. Sirens? Worse yet, somebody quotes Voltaire.However, I expect that the sensibilities of our teens will roughly discard these sorts of challenges because by the time they realize that they didn't understand it, they'll have already forgotten it.Besides, the dialog won't be as important as the many surfing scenes, the amiably reckless attitude of Burlinson, and the sassy, brassy Kidman, who was only eighteen when this was shot. She has a head of curly black hair that flops around with her, big enough to have its own weather system. She's a lot of fun. She hadn't been turned into the epitome of vacuous blond perfection that Hollywood would do it's best to achieve, but she can act and she embodies the role.There are amusing allusions to "Jaws" in the writing -- not just the dialog -- some often amusing. Just as often, it's not. I didn't get a kick out of watching Burlinson prepare a fast breakfast while the camera cuts back and forth from the frying egg to the countdown on the microwave. It wasn't offensive, just pointless.

This is a surprisingly good film, bearing in mind it was probably made on a miniscule budget. What's unforgettable about it is a 19-year old Nicole Kidman as a sassy rock singer in a red leather jacket and slit skirt (as well as in the nude for about 5 scenes - all too brief). There's more than a hint of the famous actor she was about to become, with some feisty dialogue and a totally believable intensity in her relationship with her screen boyfriend. It's a pity that the credits reveal her 'singing' was dubbed by someone else, as Moulin Rouge showed she was quite capable of doing it herself. Oh, and if you like windsurfing, or huge waves crashing on Australian beaches, you'll also like the film for those reasons, and it's even got quite a good storyline with tension rising towards the end. The scriptwriter's attempts at humour - and the briefly-glimpsed plastic shark - are a bit embarrassing though!

This film inspired me to windsurf, and for that I can only be eternally grateful. It also has some really nice shots of Nicole Kidman's butt. If you are not an Aussie the rest might not be of too much interest, but does that wind ever blow over in Perth!