A young jazz buff from Chicago arrives by bus in a California beach town to "check out the scene," and he proceeds to make a spectacle of himself by speaking in the lingo and dressing in the style indigenous to the jazz buffs of Chicago, or to the jazz buffs of twenty years earlier, or to Martian invaders trying to imitate the jazz buffs of twenty years earlier — it's difficult to tell which. John Hancock's portrait of California beach culture is a crazy-quilt of clichés, stitched together with more care than it calls for. One stroke of originality, and maybe of genius, is the squeamishness that Glynnis O'Connor shows, in her loss-of-virginity scene, for her sex partner's liberal use of his tongue. In general, the best stuff has to do with the beastliness of surfers. One surfer's way of apologizing for throwing around pieces of his girlfriend's homemade banana bread is to pound his fists into the pier pilings. Another, disconsolate at seeing his girlfriend necking with someone else at a surfing movie titled Hot, Wet, and Gnarly, tries to beat himself unconscious with his own bare hands. Dorothy Tristan, Dennis Christopher, Seymour Cassel. (1979) — Duncan Shepherd
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