Rush

[Cail]

No, not the band, the recent Ron Howard movie. It's the story of the rivalry between Formula 1 drivers Nikki Lauda and James Hunt.

I was 8 in '76, but the family was big into racing. I have vague memories of watching the Can Am series at Riverside, toiling through what seemed like a lifetime at the Daytona 24, any racing series dad could find at Summit Point, and SCCA-sanctioned parking-lot autocrosses at the Columbia Mall.

But Formula 1 was always the holy grail. Sadly, it was relegated to ABC's Wide World of Sports. My room was littered with race cars of various sizes and from various series, but my prized possession.....The one that I just sat and stared at making "vroom vroom" noises to was Mario Andretti's John Player Special Lotus.



Sadly, this film is not about Andretti, though there are a couple of gorgeous shots of his car.

It instead focuses on the competitiveness between emerging racing superstar Nikki Lauda, and flash-in-the-pan James Hunt. Men as different as Oscar and Felix, the two of them duked it out throughout the '75 & '76 seasons with Lauda taking the series championship in '75 and Hunt taking it in '76.

This may sound like an expensive, international Days of Thunder, but it's far more than that. The racing footage is breathtaking, though there's simply not enough of it. The film captures the era remarkably well, right down to the awful hair and magnificent mustaches.

But what sells the film is the chemistry between Hemsworth (Hunt) and Brühl (Lauda). Nevermind that Brühl looks remarkably like Lauda. Hemsworth has always struck me as a lightweight, and he's not doing a ton of heavy lifting here, but he's able to convey the counterpoints of Hunt; devil-may-care playboy and and fierce competitor/friend to Lauda. Every scene between the two men is electric.

Ron Howard, like Hemsworth, has also always struck me as a lightweight, but what he excels at is putting beautiful scenes on the screen (the beauty shot of the Saturn V take-off in Apollo 13 for example). The too-short racing scenes in this film set a new benchmark. Using a combination of practical and digital effects, the behind-the-wheel scenes are heart-pounding. Howard could have kept the story exactly as it is and added two more hours of on-track scenes, and I would have gobbled it up.

[peter]

As with Cail above, the racing scenes were the thing that set my pulse racing [sorry about that] in this film. I enjoyed the film very much even without Cail's background as a racing fan. One point that will perhaps hit home more in the UK than the USA is the music score [while on the subject of 'sound' can I also observe that the films 'sound - effects re the racing and tuning scenes are a big big part of how the film generates it's feeling of tension and building to a climax] sorry - the musical score - The 'theme' running through the film is almost, but not quite, the Fleetwood Mack segment from the song 'Tusk' that accompanies the start of all BBC Formula 1 racing programs. At every moment you almost expect it to break out - a similarity that cannot but have been deliberate in the decision to utilise this theme.