17-09-2013, 20:25 | #1 |
Member
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: London
Posts: 246
Reputation: 22
|
For Esau was an hairy man:Rush
One of the easiest and most revealing ways of dividing men is into "smooth" and "hairy",its a process as old as the title of this message and has furnished us with the characters of our literature and drama for nearly as long
Rush is essentially the story of an hairy man (Hunt) and a smooth man (Lauda) pitted against each other at the genesis of modern Formula 1 Its difficult to think of anything I would less like to watch than contemporary Formula 1.It gives anodyne a bad name. A procession of characterless youths processing around in mobile billboards presided over by a midget mafiosi marketing manager.Its sole saving grace is the prediliction of senior racing executives for the more esoteric forms of BDSM In the mid Seventies for 5 or 6 years it was a very different sport.It had always been dangerous but over this period the power of racing engines suddenly became much greater.Tyre manufacturing,car safety and especially the tracks got left behind.The results were stark.Every season one or two drivers were killed in Formula 1 and many more in lower formulas.Dozens werre injured and maimed as were spectators.A race in wet weather was Russian Roulette. In the post war period a new breed of teams had grown to compete with the factory teams.BRM,Lotus,Hesketh,Shadow.Most were owned and managed by hairy men who either drove themselves or employed other hairy men to do it for them.Budgets were tight and attitudes to safety were cavalier. Hunt had very much come from this milieu and he represented the last of the gentlemen drivers.Independently wealthy,precociously gifted and a natural born racer.He exuded raw natural ability Lauda was (and is) different.He was the prototype smooth man,a calculator of percentages,a meticulous "setter up" of engines and chassis and suspensions. In 1976 the two philosophies and the two men met in a head to head contest that forms the backdrop to this film.One of them survived by a whisker;the other was to be destroyed by it. The film pulls no punches-its a naked depiction of an era as vanished as the world of Jacob and Esau.Maybe go to watch it as a "sports" film........but I think its so much better than that |
|
|