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.
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.
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.