Patrick Swayze: Retrospecticus

This week we lost Mr. Patrick Swayze to cancer and that sucks balls.  No man in the world liked Dirty Dancing or Ghost because they were both preposterous on any number of levels, but that doesn’t change the fact Swayze had a long and pretty awesome career.  Let’s have a look at some highlights..

Red Dawn – Word has it this movie is being remade and is there any more appropriate time than now to make a film about Soviet forces invading a small town in Colorado?  Remember when that happened all the time during the Cold War?  Fuckin’ Reds, always paratrooping into Colorado.

Anyway, seeing as in the movie Soviets are allied with Central and South Americans and inexplicably China is fighting with the Americans, it made sense on some level to invade Colorado (it didn’t really, but just go with it).  As you might expect of such an invasion, a group of highschool kids escape the nefarious Russian forces and plot a resistance.  A resistance led by Patrick Swayze.

Patrick Swayze is so intense in this that he manages to kill Russian special forces troops with the help of little more than Charlie Sheen, who is no help to anyone.  That’s amazing.  In the end, Patrick Swayze, faced with insurmountable odds, says “fuck you” to the Russian forces and plans a suicide mission.  Probably he dies, they never really say for sure.

Road House – Probably the best movie ever about a road house, Road House features Swayze, Sam Elliot, Jeff Healy and one-time extreme wrestler Terry Funk.  Take that, Charlie Sheen, you fuckin’ limp-wristed excuse for a costar.

This road house is on fire, bitches!

Swayze stars as a bouncer who also is apparently a champion of justice, because all good bouncers have hobbies.  And feathered hair.  You can tell he’s intense because he has a degree in philosophy and only the most awesome of bouncers have those.

The plot kind of breaks down at this point (this point being the beginning of the film) insofar as never has anyone anywhere had so much riding on the bouncer at a shitty local bar in the middle of nowhere, thus making it hard to relate to anything that happens in this movie.  But that doesn’t stop Patrick Swayze with the help of Sam Elliot, who’s like the Yoda of bouncers, from kicking ass and taking names.  In the end, Swayze goes skinning dipping with a doctor.  Fuck yeah.

Point Break – Arguably the best film of Swayze’s career, so long as you don’t actually argue it.  This movie was so fucking awesome it made Keanu Reeves famous.  Keanu fuckin’ Reeves, who can’t even think.  Plus it cast Lori Petty as the romantic interest and she looks like a leper.  Any movie that has that working against it and still succeeds must be awesome.  Oh, and Gary Busey is in it.  Check and mate.

Dude, i love you. Whoa...

Swayze stars as some preposterous surfer dude named Bodhi, which is totally the name he’d have if he were a preposterous surfer dude.  But more awesome than that is that sometimes he puts on a Ronald Reagan masks and robs people.  Man, if he were only drinking a Mountain Dew at the same time this movie would have been way ahead of the curve of extreme awesome.

If you’ve seen the Fast and the Furious then you’ve seen Point Break, because that movie pretty much totally ripped off this movie, with the exception of Vin Diesel not having the awesome surfer hair of Patrick Swayze and Paul Walker inexplicably being somehow less interesting to watch than Keanu Reeves, which is like eating a meal that somehow tastes worse than feces.

So Swayze is kind of the villain in the movie in that he’s a thief and Keanu is the undercover cop out to get him but he’s so awesome Keanu has all this manlove for him and his way of life he feels conflicted.  By the end of the movie, rather than taking him on an excellent adventure to prison, Keanu Lets Swayze take his surfboard out into the ocean where the storm of the century is wreaking havoc so he can surf himself…TO DEATH!  It’s awesome.

To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar – Swayze dresses like a woman in this movie.  For like the whole movie.

Nope. Not hot.

Donnie Darko – Swayze seemed to have disappeared from the spotlight for a few years before coming back with a small role in the mindfuck of a movie Donnie Darko.  Mostly the movie’s about how offputting Jake Gyllenhaal is to watch for any extended period of time and a really awful rabbit, but Swayze’s brief role as a motivational speaker/pederast is memorable as hell.  I’m not afraid anymore!

So long, Mr. Swayze.  You’ll be missed.