Rush (2013)
Directed by Ron Howard
In the 1970s, a rivalry propels race car drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt to fame and glory — until a horrible accident threatens to end it all.
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The rather routine racing scenes in "Rush" resemble the quick-cut sequences from many other films such as "Days of Thunder" and "Grand Prix." (What's with all those cameras on the ground capturing how the racing cars blow the grass around?)
While its tenure was short lived, we still have efforts like Grand Prix and Le Mans to remind us of what mediocre moviemaking is/was all about back then.
A worthy successor to John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix” (1966) and the documentary-like “Le Mans” (1971) with Steve McQueen, Ron Howard’s “Rush” puts the audience in the driver’s seat of the 1976 Formula One race car season.
Otherwise, apart from a little nudity and swearing, this isn’t all that much different than John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966) — except that Grand Prix was in Cinerama on its original engagements and was about 50 minutes longer.
That's the sport of Formula 1 racing, probably given its best big-screen exposure in the John Frankenheimer film "Grand Prix" (and the recent, thrilling documentary "Senna").
(Three racing films from my childhood kind of run together in my brain: “Grand Prix” with James Garner, “Winning” with Paul Newman, and “Le Mans” with Steve McQueen.
The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) never goes for those adrenaline-charged images that inspire other racing movies from “Grand Prix” and “Le Mans” to the “Fast & Furious” series.
While its tenure was short lived, we still have efforts like Grand Prix and Le Mans to remind us of what mediocre moviemaking is/was all about back then.
A worthy successor to John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix” (1966) and the documentary-like “Le Mans” (1971) with Steve McQueen, Ron Howard’s “Rush” puts the audience in the driver’s seat of the 1976 Formula One race car season.
(Three racing films from my childhood kind of run together in my brain: “Grand Prix” with James Garner, “Winning” with Paul Newman, and “Le Mans” with Steve McQueen.
Subject wise car racing of any facet has not transitioned well to the big screen, with only the Steve McQueen led Le Mans and Will Ferrell NASCAR spoof Talladega Nights crossing the finish line intact.
If you like this, try: “Winning” with Paul Newman, “Grand Prix” with James Garner, and “Le Mans” with Steve McQueen, and Peter Morgan’s “The Damned United” about another real-life sports rivalry.
While there isn't really a Formula One racing film to compare to Ron Howard 's " Rush " (unless the Sylvester Stallone starring " Driven " from 2001 counts), the Nascar themed " Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby " came to mind with Jackie Chan 's " Thunderbolt " coming in a close second.
In the 2006 comedy Talladega Nights , Will Ferrell and Sasha Baron Cohen were hilarious as NASCAR drivers bent on each other’s destruction, while the mesmerizing 2010 documentary Senna traced the real-life competition between the Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna and his career archrival, the French driver Alain Prost.
Subject wise car racing of any facet has not transitioned well to the big screen, with only the Steve McQueen led Le Mans and Will Ferrell NASCAR spoof Talladega Nights crossing the finish line intact.
We don’t get many films about professional racing, only “Senna”, “Days of Thunder”, and “Talladega Nights” come immediately to mind, so it’s always refreshing to see a film attempt to capture the speed and power of the elegant machines built to satiate humankind’s relentless need to race.
While there isn't really a Formula One racing film to compare to Ron Howard 's " Rush " (unless the Sylvester Stallone starring " Driven " from 2001 counts), the Nascar themed " Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby " came to mind with Jackie Chan 's " Thunderbolt " coming in a close second.
It's much better than Tom Cruise's Days of Thunder and Sylvester Stallone's Driven.
If those things are what you want, seek out 2008's dazzling, candy-coated, sorely underappreciated " Speed Racer " or even 2001's Sylvester Stallone ensemble action-drama, " Driven ," instead.
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The racing scenes, brought to gloriously vivid life by Oscar-winning cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), evoke that feeling of the title with cameras and angles that don’t just place us within the cars but virtually inside the drivers’ heads.
The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) never goes for those adrenaline-charged images that inspire other racing movies from “Grand Prix” and “Le Mans” to the “Fast & Furious” series.
He's forged a team combining "Slumdog Millionaire" veterans like fluid cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and production designer Mark Digby with his own regular editors Dan Hanley and Mike Hill and veteran composer Hans Zimmer .
He usually works for directors like Danny Boyle, on “Slumdog Millionaire,” or Lars von Trier, on “Antichrist,” and it speaks well for Howard that he sought out someone to embolden the look of his film—to stoke its colors and give it the blaze of a waking dream.
Ron Howard, re-teaming with his “Frost/Nixon” screenwriter, the Oscar-darling Peter Morgan (“The Queen”), and thanks to sterling efforts from his regular editor, Daniel P. Hanley and Danny Boyle’s favorite cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (“Trance”, “Slumdog Millionaire”) has turned Formula 1 racing into moving, surround sound art.
The good news is that "Rush" looks more like a Danny Boyle film than a Howard film, and that's because Howard uses Boyle's Oscar-winning cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle ("Slumdog Millionaire"), to capture the fluid, high-speed world of Formula One auto racing in the mid-1970s.
Unfortunately, Morgan and Howard never really investigate their compulsion to drive; urges we saw explored fully in the supreme F1 doco Senna, and the torturous tale of extreme sportsman Aron Ralston, 127 Hours.
Scratching an itch, this Formula One drama has a lot going for it at the starting line: a real-life 1976 rivalry between magnetic competitors James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl); a burnished, beer-commercial glow courtesy of inspired cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle; and the director of the original Grand Theft Auto, Ron Howard.
Howard’s initial foray into directing was a Roger Corman-produced juvenile car-crash movie called Grand Theft Auto (1977), which he helmed when he was still thought of, to borrow from a Saturday Night Live skit, “lil’ Opie Cunningham.”
It’s an impressively fast-paced film for Howard, the director of numerous biopics and historical pieces based in in other worlds, but the very nature of its pacing and setting harks back to “Grand Theft Auto,” his very first feature as a director.
To witness this level of storytelling skill (applied to a subject only a fraction of the public inherently finds interesting) is to marvel at not only what cinema can do when image, sound and score are so artfully combined to suggest vicarious experience, but also to realize how far Howard has come since his directorial debut, 1977’s bang-up “Grand Theft Auto.”
This was the guy who starred in Eat My Dust and whose first movie as a director was Grand Theft Auto, after all; it's sort of a homecoming for him and a relief to be reminded that expectations attached to his name don't always have to include blandness.
Director Ron Howard ("Frost/Nixon"), whose last film, "The Dilemma," was his worst, has rebounded with one of his best, perhaps not surprising for the man whose first feature was 1977's "Grand Theft Auto" for Roger Corman.
The shrewd script by Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon,” “The Last King of Scotland,” “The Queen”) stresses the parallels in the men’s lives.
The immensely gifted screenwriter Peter Morgan reunites with his “Frost/Nixon” director Ron Howard and returns to his favorite theme, a real-life drama about the clash between two brilliantly talented but flawed figures.
But could director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan, who combined superbly to bring a similarly contentious clash to the screens with Frost/Nixon , manage to do full justice to this adrenalin-fuelled tale?
In some ways, “Rush” reminds me of Howard’s other 70s drama “Frost/Nixon.”
Scripted by Peter Morgan, whose stage play Frost/Nixon formed the basis of Howard's previous real-life 70s grudge match, Rush paints its duelling antagonists with the most baldly oppositional black-and-white brushstrokes.
Ron Howard tends to fare better when his material is focused on direct conflict (see: Apollo 13 , or to a different extent Frost/Nixon ) and Peter Morgan’s screenplay abides, offering a series of dramatic vehicle races and a story that neatly interprets all the parallels and perpendiculars between Hunt’s and Lauda’s personal lives as a different kind of race altogether.
I was reminded, particularly in the scene where a malfunction in Lauda’s car leads to his crash, of Howard’s Apollo 13 (one of my most favorite films ever): engineering, and the moments when it breaks down, is an inevitable partner in human stories nowadays.
People hurtling toward an uncertain fate in a fragile, tube-like vehicle is a concept Howard previously explored in "Apollo 13." Death is a possible and occasional outcome when tooling around a track in a "bomb on wheels" at 170 mph, but the risk-reward ratio is different for each man.
The best part first: Rush is Ron Howard's best film since Apollo 13 .
The cars are like the spacecraft of “Apollo 13,” Howard’s greatest film, and just as likely to spin and burst into flames.
He’s certainly included adult themes into films like Night Shift, Ransom and The Missing before (though I can’t honestly remember what was objectionable about those R-rated films).
Even operating at only half power, Howard has produced work more watchable than that of most directors, nothing-to-sneeze-at entertainments such as Night Shift , Parenthood , The Paper (which foreshadowed the current print journalism crisis) and The Missing .
Fully conceding that Frost/Nixon is the exception that proves the rule, it’s been 12 years since A Beautiful Mind (wildly overrated); other than riffing on established genres, what worth do The Missing, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons and The Dilemma really possess?
Howard has made some smart adult pictures, including "Frost/Nixon" and the perennially underappreciated western "The Missing," but that touch has eluded him here.
As for Rush, it stands alongside the likes of Howard's The Dilemma and The Missing.
Even operating at only half power, Howard has produced work more watchable than that of most directors, nothing-to-sneeze-at entertainments such as Night Shift , Parenthood , The Paper (which foreshadowed the current print journalism crisis) and The Missing .
None exude the energy or personality of his small but wonderfully entertaining films from the '80s (Night Shift, Splash, Cocoon, Parenthood).
Even operating at only half power, Howard has produced work more watchable than that of most directors, nothing-to-sneeze-at entertainments such as Night Shift , Parenthood , The Paper (which foreshadowed the current print journalism crisis) and The Missing .
As the ’80s progressed, Howard created various memorable films like Splash, Cocoon, Willow and Parenthood.
None exude the energy or personality of his small but wonderfully entertaining films from the '80s (Night Shift, Splash, Cocoon, Parenthood).
Yet the man whose credits include “Cocoon,” “Frost/Nixon,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Parenthood” and “Apollo 13” should be treated at least as well as some of the artistes whose unwatchable movies get routinely praised.
As the ’80s progressed, Howard created various memorable films like Splash, Cocoon, Willow and Parenthood.
None exude the energy or personality of his small but wonderfully entertaining films from the '80s (Night Shift, Splash, Cocoon, Parenthood).
Yet the man whose credits include “Cocoon,” “Frost/Nixon,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “Parenthood” and “Apollo 13” should be treated at least as well as some of the artistes whose unwatchable movies get routinely praised.
As the ’80s progressed, Howard created various memorable films like Splash, Cocoon, Willow and Parenthood.
None exude the energy or personality of his small but wonderfully entertaining films from the '80s (Night Shift, Splash, Cocoon, Parenthood).
This is the director who showed us Daryl Hannah’s butt in Splash, because PG used to mean something, dammit.
Here, you sense, is Howard at his most relaxed, as he was in “Splash,” almost thirty years ago.
But Howard has always been a die-hard populist, whether serving up the sparkling romantic fantasy of Splash or delving into the murky waters of psychosis in A Beautiful Mind .
Howard, whose previous tales of men in professional peril include the topnotch “Apollo 13” as well as “Backdraft” and “Cinderella Man,” works with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to create a style in the racing scenes that makes the most of every angle.
Apollo 13 , Rush ) don't get that way because they avoid that tendency, but because it works well in the context of the narrative.
What was that beautiful mind thinking, I wonder, when he committed to projects such as Gung Ho , Backdraft , EDtv (which foreshadowed the current reality craze but seriously blew anyway) and this one?
Director Ron Howard has had a curious career, bouncing between populist entertainments (The Da Vinci Code, EdTV) and more prestige-minded pictures (A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon).
What was that beautiful mind thinking, I wonder, when he committed to projects such as Gung Ho , Backdraft , EDtv (which foreshadowed the current reality craze but seriously blew anyway) and this one?
While there isn't really a Formula One racing film to compare to Ron Howard 's " Rush " (unless the Sylvester Stallone starring " Driven " from 2001 counts), the Nascar themed " Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby " came to mind with Jackie Chan 's " Thunderbolt " coming in a close second.
From the first time we meet Daniel Brühl’s Niki Lauda, the man who will become Hunt’s biggest rival, we’re immediately reminded of F. Murray Abraham’s Saleri from “Amadeus” – a man so bitter about the success of his rival that he becomes obsessed with showing that he’s the better man and racer.
At heart it’s “Amadeus” on wheels, only this time Salieri is the Austrian.
Screenwriter Peter Morgan sets the stage for a high-octane riff on Amadeus, with Lauda’s intense preparations undone time and again by Hunt’s nonchalant, instinctive genius.
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Essentially a more serious version of Days of Thunder , albeit more from the perspective of Tom Cruise’s rivalry with Michael Rooker than his romance with Nicole Kidman, the movie hard-sells the kind of “competition as camaraderie” between men that’s really, really hard for dudes (myself included) to resist.
It's much better than Tom Cruise's Days of Thunder and Sylvester Stallone's Driven.
We don’t get many films about professional racing, only “Senna”, “Days of Thunder”, and “Talladega Nights” come immediately to mind, so it’s always refreshing to see a film attempt to capture the speed and power of the elegant machines built to satiate humankind’s relentless need to race.
There's a junkyard of movies - "Driven," "Days of Thunder," "Le Mans" - that faltered because filmmakers used their shiny, fast-moving automobiles as an excuse to ignore the story.
Frankly, when the halfway point rolled around and I thought to myself, 'I’d rather be watching Days of Thunder again," I knew things were veering off course.
The true story also became the inspiration for Moby Dick.