Into the Blue Reviewed

Managed, yesterday, to get a hold of a pair of tickets to a preview screening of Into the Blue at the Richmond and John Paramount. (Across the street from a much more estimable place, where I would recommend one or two viewings of this little masterpiece.) And, unlike my last experience of a film premier, I actually got to see the movie this time, and, alas!, there was no after-party with the Beyoncé Knowles/Britney Spears hybrid, Jessica Alba. (Though—now that I’ve seen ITB—I feel intimately, almost carnally, acquainted with her.)

My wife and I secured a set of very plum seats, dead centre of the theatre, but at the cost of being there nearly forty-five minutes early. So I distracted myself the while noticing that Toronto teenagers continue to be a very audacious breed of adolescent when it comes to appearances. Growing up in Ottawa I always found it curious (ridiculous, actually, is what I found it—and correctly so, I really must admit) that Hogtown fostered so many of an impressionable (but still, I can't help marveling, desperately self-conscious) age, willing to make themselves into fashion guinea-pigs. They looked silly then—conspicuously 16 trying to seem 21, in spite of the fact that no 21 year old could ever be found that bore any resemblance to them—and they look even sillier now ... And while I’m the tiniest bit impressed by their come-hell-or-high-water sense of daring, their total lack of shame precludes them altogether from any hope I might have for their generation of a future without hell or high water.

(Likewise this taste-defying vanity with a majority of gay men, apparently. And irrespective of age in their cases. Witness the (I guess it is meant to be) stylishly smushed faux-hawk, with the centre bit (i.e. the ‘hawk’ bit) bleached almost white on an otherwise dark-haired head, and a very tight, baby-blue collared shirt, left open to a pasty white and irregularly haired navel ... Just out to see a flick.)

After the first ten minutes of the movie my wife whispered to me that, perhaps, we weren’t its target demographic ... Indeed, no we weren't ...

But if you like frat boys relentlessly conversing in Ebonics; or if you like to see sallow, blonde hack actresses, two disastrous films from their pornographic début, delivering lines like “So when are you gonna stop trickin’ and start pimpin’?”—then this film, likely, will move you very deeply indeed. If you’re not too picky about even remotely original plots; or if you prefer your characters especially thin on character; or if you like not being surprised by the bits in a film that are meant to be surprising ... If, in short, you have no reason to see a film other than to have Jessica Alba’s bottom and (apparently, digitally enhanced) breasts gratuitously zeroed-in-on and invasively probed with your POV, then Into the Blue is, unquestionably, the movie for you!