A friend of mine from work mentioned he just dug this film out of a pile of old movies sitting around at home, so I figured what the heck, bring it in and I'll take a look. My date of birth puts me about a decade earlier than the characters in this picture, but still within that baby boomer generation that the film was meant to appeal to. The picture takes a more mature approach than those beach blanket films of the Sixties when young adults had absolutely nothing to worry about. Here the main characters were about to face growing up and out of the sun culture they were so fondly a part of from the early Sixties into the mid-Seventies. The poignancy of the film is represented by local legend Matt Johnson's (Jan-Michael Vincent) unsteady growth out of his teen years, facing a wartime draft and the dissolution of his boyhood band of rowdies. Told from the view of a narrator who's never identified (unless I missed it), the story is told in a series of vignettes that time-jump in rough increments of three years at a time until the denouement of 'Big Wednesday' - that once in a lifetime confluence of moon and tides that produce the biggest waves ever to make their appearance on The Point, an area of California coastline where the story takes place.
Seeing the movie's leads, Vincent, Gary Busey and William Katt is an interesting exercise in nostalgia for anyone who's golden age coincides with the Seventies. I don't know about Vincent and Katt, but Busey surely wouldn't fit into those swim trunks anymore. That ever present snarly smile of his was on display throughout a major portion of the picture.
I guess if surfing's your thing, this will be an entertaining flick, weaving a handful of the era's great songs into the soundtrack - tunes like 'Locomotion', 'That's What I Want' and 'He's a Rebel' - all cleverly placed to counterpoint the action on screen and the attitudes of the main players. The surfing scenes at the finale are what you'll want to stick around for as the film's hero trio take that last ride into the sunset, figuratively speaking. It's what everyone in the story was waiting for, the Big Wednesday of their lives that could only be described in the jargon of the surfer - "It's a Boss Swell".
Seeing the movie's leads, Vincent, Gary Busey and William Katt is an interesting exercise in nostalgia for anyone who's golden age coincides with the Seventies. I don't know about Vincent and Katt, but Busey surely wouldn't fit into those swim trunks anymore. That ever present snarly smile of his was on display throughout a major portion of the picture.
I guess if surfing's your thing, this will be an entertaining flick, weaving a handful of the era's great songs into the soundtrack - tunes like 'Locomotion', 'That's What I Want' and 'He's a Rebel' - all cleverly placed to counterpoint the action on screen and the attitudes of the main players. The surfing scenes at the finale are what you'll want to stick around for as the film's hero trio take that last ride into the sunset, figuratively speaking. It's what everyone in the story was waiting for, the Big Wednesday of their lives that could only be described in the jargon of the surfer - "It's a Boss Swell".