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ITS title says it all: The Big Book of Biker Flicks:
40 of the best motorcycle movies of all time. Written by John Wooley
and Michael H. Price, the paperback deals with motorcycles as a
central cinematic tool from which the featured Hollywood movies
anchor their plots on without necessarily—overtly or
subtly—portraying the sheer joy motorcyclists derive from riding a
bike.
And that, quite frankly, sucks.
Of course, Hollywood has more
serious crimes—Ben Affleck, for instance—and I can’t expect it
to churn out biker movies that will truly and most likely appeal to
ardent motorcyclists exclusively. To an extent, I also do not expect
Misters Wooley and Price to list only those that fall in the
aforementioned criterion.
Besides, to their credit the
biker-flicks book includes selections true bike guys love, which
obviously means Hollywood has produced its share of them, too.
My beef is that let’s not call
a film a “bike movie” if the motorcycle element could be taken
out and get substituted by, say, an oven toaster, and the storyline
could still stand. The lead actor or other characters may ride a
motorcycle in a movie, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bike
movie. Prime examples are MI2 or Days of Thunder or Top Gun or the
Terminator series where Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger rode
bikes in. Or those where bad guys come riding into town aboard
Harleys and dirt bikes to terrorize hapless folks. And especially
not any of those sappy boy-gets-girl pulp where a Matthew
McConaughey or a Gabby Concepcion hams it up on a bike to woo the
pa-cute chick.
Bike flicks may not always be
good—or even coherent—but they’re not that detestable.
Take Biker Boyz or Torque. With a
plot that’s about as thick as chicken stock, Biker Boyz is a
sorry, poorly written father-and-son tale of conflict, where lead
star Laurence Fishburne, who as Morpheus in The Matrix rocks, is
reduced to a pathetic, brooding joke. But Biker Boyz appeals to bike
enthusiasts for its credulous action shots and informed choice in
motorcycles. Which is not surprising at all, as members of famous
motorcycle clubs served as consultants to the movie to conceptualize
the stunts and other action scenes.
Most of the sequences in Torque,
in contrast, are unreal and made more spectacular through the magic
of CGI. Also, the movie’s super sport bikes inexplicably turn into
dual-sport ones as they go off-road. But the movie obviously does
not aspire to any award recognition nor does it lay claim to
authenticity. What bike lovers simply find hard to argue against
Torque are its images of the Y2K turbine motorcycle and Monet Mazur
garbed in tight leathers crouching over a sport bike. Yummy.
Come to think of it, Wild Hogs
belongs in the same company with Biker Boyz and Torque. This John
Travolta/Tim Allen/Martin Lawrence/William H. Macy-starrer is
another cliché riddled yarn of midlife crisis, midlife comforts,
midlife marriages and midlife paunch and hairline, where grown men
afflicted with these ills find comfort in collegial togetherness and
fat, chrome-laden Harley-Davidson hogs. The movie loses steam
halfway as it rolls on a convoluted terrain of a storyline, but the
initial scenes of motorcycle group-riding and the open road touch
bikers in a way that couldn’t be understood by other people unless
they themselves get out on the open road riding bikes. As the movie
tirelessly points out, riding means freedom—if not bugs in one’s
teeth.
Easy Rider, meanwhile, straddles
the line between being formulaic and seminal, widely regarded as
successful in capturing the rebellious spirit of the late ’60s
even if such theme had already been tackled numerously by the time
the movie appeared (1969). But its arthouse approach, plus with
Peter Fonda (who had since become an icon in the motorcycling world)
and Dennis Hopper riding choppers “looking for America,” make it
not only a counter-culture movement classic but a genuine biker
movie.
Touches like Jack Nicholson (who
was then unknown) wearing a football helmet while riding with Hopper
on a bike add a comic element while Hopper’s and Fonda’s violent
death aboard motorcycles (they were shot) is pure shock value.
For its part, On Any Sunday
can’t be called anything but a biker movie simply because it’s a
documentary on motorcycle racing—dirt racing, to be precise.
Released in 1971, the movie features the motorcycle personalities of
the period, as well as the sport’s enthusiasts. Now if those
aren’t strong enough arguments, the fact that the legendary Steve
McQueen, who was an accomplished motorbike racer himself and was
only prevented from doing his own bike stunts in the movie The Great
Escape due to insurance issues, is in the movie should lay to rest
any doubt about On Any Sunday’s place in bike-movie annals.
Sharing the McQueen docu in its
lofty spot is Diarios de Motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries), from
which this column pays tribute to, although I have made it clear
from Issue One that I harbor no illusion of being compared to
Ernesto “Che” Guevara or Gael Garcia Bernal, the actor who
played the lead part in the movie based on Guevara’s journal.
For the most part, Diarios de
Motocicleta is a poignant movie, chronicling in cinematic detail
Guevara’s social awakening and eventual transition into a
revolutionary as he and friend Alberto Granado (played in the movie
by Rodrigo de la Serna) traverse South America on a decrepit 500cc
Norton motorcycle. Halfway through the movie, that bike was written
off, with Bernal and de la Serna continuing on with their odyssey by
other means.
So, you see, if Guevara and
Granado had not taken off in a bike, they wouldn’t have called
their journal Diarios de Motocicleta, and therefore, the screen
adaptation wouldn’t have been titled as such, too. If Guevara and
Granado had taken a train from the start, everything would have been
known as Diarios de Tren, wouldn’t it?
And that, in my book, makes the
Diarios de Motocicleta movie the definitive bike flick.
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