F1 Fanatic

There’s something about racing movies that I just find really contrived and unrealistic. It seems impossible to make a good fictional racing movie because it all just seems so “that would never happen”-ish, and even though that’s what you look for in a movie, an interesting story, it just puts me off because some of the results are laughably bad.
It would be interesting to see a racing movie based on a real event (isn’t there going to be one based on Niki Lauda and James Hunt’s battles sometime fairly soon?).

As far as racing documentaries go, one of my favourites (considering I’m getting Senna for christmas so I can’t judge it just yet) is ‘Faster’ by Mark Neale. It’s about MotoGP in the transition era between the 500cc’s and the MotoGP era (around 2001 and 2002), though it also covers other interesting parts of the sport’s history, such as the duels between Wayne Rainey and Kevin Schwants in the 80s/90s.

It was one of my reasons for getting into MotoGP, and I’d seriously reccommend it to anyone interested in MotoGP or anyone with even the vaguest interest in motorsport in general.

I found a little bit of information on Ron Howard’s Hunt-Lauda project, Rush, in the December 2011 issue of Top Gear Australia magazine. There wasn’t much, but it’s being written by Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen, Frost/Nixon and started what would become Skyfall (though I disagreed with his interpretation of James Bond). Morgan said he met with Bernie Ecclestone, who apparently didn’t want the film to be “about Formula 1″, but Morgan said he was only ever treating the sport as a framing device to tell the stroy of “two men with different attitudes, philosophies and values” who simply happen to be Formula 1 drivers. It’s sounding like Frost/Nixon meets Rocky at two hundred kilometres an hour.

I admit to being a little apprehensive about it. Like I said, I disliked Morgan’s interpretation of James Bond, and I find The Queen and Frost/Nixon to be quite boring. Morgan seems to value understanding characters above all else, which is fair enough, but he tends to do it by having one character studying the other. It was particularly evident in Frost/Nixon with David Frost trying to analyse Richard Nixon while Nixon tried to assess Frost. There’s no really introspective elements because he always seems to focus on events in a way that affects both characters equally. For example, if Morgan was writing a film about Senna and Prost, then it is unlikely that he would look at the political consequences of Suzuka in 1989. The film would likely show Senna and Prost colliding, but I doubt there would be much on Balestre’s interference with the race result, because it throws out the balance between Senna and Prost by showing an event that played out in favour of one, and that would force Morgan to commit to one character as the protagonist.

@joey-poey that opening Sequence is mega.. love it!

Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Drive’ is one of the best films I’ve seen. It’s not really a film about racing but the main character is prepping to become a racing driver, before other things happen.

It’s like a 70s b-movie but it moves along at a slow and dreamy pace. I love it.