Rolando Molina | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Pacific Blue, a cop show that aired from 1996 to 2000 on the USA Network! It’s currently streaming everywhere, though I’m watching it on Tubi.

This week, Victor gets a plot.

Episode 2.4 “Bangers”

(Dir by Charles Siebert, originally aired on September 14th, 1996)

Victor del Toro, who often doesn’t get to do much on this show, finally gets a storyline of his very own. Unfortunately, it involves trying to keep a young man for his old neighborhood from joining a gang. One thing that you can always count on whenever you watch any sort of cop show from the 90s, if there’s a Latino cop in the cast, he’s going to have to keep someone from joining a gang. It was one of the biggest cliches on the 90s.

And don’t get me wrong. Gangs are a reality in America and they are a problem. At the same time, though, is there a reason why every time a Latino appeared on a show like this, they always seemed to either be in a gang or on the verge of joining a gang? Not every Latino family is poor, not every young Latino male is struggling with the pressure to join a gang, and for that matter, not every Latino with a tattoo is a member of a street gang.

While Victor dealt with the gangs moving into the neighborhood, Chris and Corey decided to rent an apartment together. Needless to say, things didn’t go well. Corey reveals that she is hyperorganized and likes to keep every surface in the apartment clean and spotless. (I don’t really see what that’s a problem.) Chris is revealed to be a slob who hangs her clothes around the kitchen and who pours a box of cereal out on the floor because she’s tired of Corey always cleaning. Isn’t Chris supposed to be a hotshot fighter pilot? I mean, up until this episode, there was absolutely nothing about her character that would suggest that she was incapable of picking up her clothes. I would think that, being a member of the Air Force, she would actually have had some sort of discipline drilled into her. It’s kind of like how soldiers still tend to stand at attention even while visiting their families. Anyway, this storyline ends with Chris throwing food around the apartment and Corey grabbing a pair of scissors and attacking Chris’s laundry …. wait, what? I’m sorry, this is psychotic behavior.

Don’t worry, though. Chris and Corey share a laugh about it and agree to remain friends but not roommates. Uhm, Chris …. Corey took a pair of scissors to your clothes. I mean, I don’t like sloppy people either but I generally don’t try to destroy their possessions.

Of course, the main problem with this episode is the same problem that all of the episodes have had. They’re cops on bikes! They wear shorts and polo shirts and they spend all of their time insisting that they’re real cops even though it’s obvious that they aren’t. Real cops don’t ride bicycles with baskets on the back.

This episode did not leave me with much confidence in California law enforcement.

Oh, memories!

I don’t know if I can describe how much my girlfriends and I loved Crazy/Beautiful when it first came out in 2001. We saw it in the theaters, we rewatched it when it came on cable, and after I bought it on DVD, we watched it at my house. We loved the movie because we all dreamed of having a sensitive, hot boyfriend like Carlos Nunez (played by Jay Hernandez), who would love us no matter how obnoxious or bratty we may have been. Even if we sometimes got annoyed with her, we still all related to out-of-control Nicole (Kirsten Dunst), who everyone in the world had given up on but who ultimately just wanted her father to pay as much attention to her as he did to his new wife and his new baby. We liked the film because we wanted to be both crazy and beautiful.

And, of course, there was all the sex, all of it filmed in beautiful soft-focus with the camera always suggesting that it was showing more than it actually was. Crazy/Beautiful was one of those films that made you feel grown up while still being very careful not to lose its PG-13 rating.

Yes, back in the day, I loved Crazy/Beautiful.

And you know what?

It may just be the nostalgia talking but I still love it. I recently rewatched Crazy/Beautiful and, despite the fact that I was now watching as a “critic” as opposed to a 15 year-old with issues, I quickly fell under the film’s spell. There’s just something about Crazy/Beautiful that I simply cannot resist.

It’s a beautiful film. Director John Stockwell has made a career out of making movies about pretty people hanging out on pretty beaches and Crazy/Beautiful has a lot of both. When Carlos, a responsible high school senior who lives in East Los Angeles and who is hoping to attend the U.S. Navy Academy, first meets Nicole, she’s doing community service by picking up trash on the beach. What Carlos doesn’t find out until later is that Nicole is the daughter of U.S. Rep. Tom Oakley (played, somewhat inevitably, by Bruce Davison). Nicole is haunted by her mother’s death and feels that her well-meaning but ineffectual father has abandoned her. At first, her relationship with Carlos seems to be yet another part of her rebellion but soon, both she and Carlos are madly in love.

Can Carlos save Nicole from herself? Can Nicole love Carlos without leading him down the path of self-destruction? Will Nicole and her father ever reconnect? Will … oh, who cares? You already know the answers. Crazy/Beautiful is less about the story and more about how the story is told. Stockwell keeps the story moving along and fills the screen with colorful and romantic images that make Crazy/Beautiful into the perfect teenage daydream. He also makes perfect use of the undeniable chemistry between Jay Hernandez and Kirsten Dunst. Both of the stars give such good performances that you really do come to care about the characters that they are playing and hope that things work out for them. Kirsten Dunst, in particular, gives a brave performance and doesn’t shy away from playing up Nicole’s abrasiveness. It takes courage to play a character who can be unlikable. It takes talent to make that unlikable character sympathetic and, fortunately, Kirsten Dunst shows a lot of both in Crazy/Beautiful.