Bruce, the family member of Andie and Katie’s I visited last year when Katie and I summered in Rhode Island, was an actor in Wind, the Americas Cup movie that finally popped-up in my Netflix queue. I watched it tonight and it’s a fairly standard sporting movie setup with a down-on-its-luck team triumphing over adversity in The Big Game. Specifically it’s:
- Boy has girl and boat.
- Boy loses (in order) girl, race, boat and self-respect.
- Boy spends a few lost months on the salt flats of Utah.
- Boy regains self-respect, boat and girl.
- Boy wins race.
Really what’s impressive (and, I’m told, the reason Bruce likes the movie, too), is the graceful and seemingly effortless cinematography and editing of the boats racing neck-in-neck via a combination of tracking shots from other boats, on-boat action footage and helicopter shots, seamlessly stitched together. Even more impressive is knowing this movie was made in the early-‘90s and likely contains little if any CGI trickery, compared to more recent seaborne fare, like, say, Master and Commander, which was a lot of Industrial Light & Magic and a giant water tank in Mexico.
This screencap depicts Bruce as Sheik, looking pensive about a loss in a race. Although mostly he’s seen in the background, toiling aboard the American boat, he’s one of the lead crew members, addressed directly by stars Matthew Modine and mid-nosejob Jennifer Grey, who yell at him during a crucial moment to “put up the Womper,” a giant spinnaker co-invented by Gray and crafty genius Stellan Skarsgård.
You will agree Bruce is a handsome fellow and I can tell you this is doubly so when he’s in manly action, tacking, scrambling up rigging, getting the jib down, and a bunch of other sailing stuff I didn’t fully understand. (Although Wind’s on-boat maneuvers may be a rush of confusion to landlubbers, the movie explains sailing race strategy by unobtrusive and effective cutaways to live footage of a TV commentator and animated graphics of the races’ turning points.)