What we need is good biker movie!

Exmoor beast

Exmoor beast

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Minehead,Somerset, ENGLAND OF COURSE
The reason younger people aren’t into bikes is there hasn’t been any good bike movies for years, in fact the recent ones have put people off as they as so bad! Easy Rider spawned the chopper scene, On Any Sunday got people dirt racing ( think how big motocross was in the 70’s..) Stone & Mad Max had a huge following , Quadraphonia made scooters cool & even The Great Escape has inspired everyone. We had Evel, Sheene, McQueen all being cool as..
Ronnie Mac the movie would be good.
When I was at the Triumph shop it was situated on an old service station site, so we had grass all around the premises. At lunch time the lads would goad me into “ Do Steve McQueen!” - I would then get the new demo Bonneville out of the showroom and razz it around the grass, skid in front of the showroom and the check the tank for fuel before razzing off sending a roost of mud everywhere…What a jape!
My old boss Mike would come back “ Who the fuck has been tearing up the grass..look at my fucking bike..the exhausts have gone blue!”
Well I blame The Great Escape..
 
Going to be difficult to come even close to what Easy Rider and On Any Sunday did for us.

I couldn't imagine anything more boring than sitting through 5 hours of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". :eek:

Che thumping through the jungle on a Norton single in "The Motorcycle Diaries" was pretty cool.

"The Worlds' Fastest Indian" has to be way towards the top of every bikers favourite movie list. Perhaps the best film to date to embody the passion and thrills involved in biking, with Anthony Hopkins playing his role perfectly.

Using a 1950/60's swingarm Triumph dressed up as a German military bike in the key scene of "The Great Escape" is one of the most horrendous cinematic errors of all time imho.:oops: The King of Cool and friends made up for a lot though.

piet
 
Most motorbikes featured in movies these days involve chases with the bad guys trying to machine gun the goodies, now and then a goodie making his escape from the baddies and horrific crashes. Jason Byrne in Tangiers was pretty cool. but these are not bike movies as we would like to see. The Triumph stand in, almost as bad are the two stroke soundtracks of four strokes.
I agree Piet, Worlds fastest Indian is a fantastic film even for people not into bikes.
 
I think clearly the best I have seen for long time is a TV series named Last to Brake, also knows as Ride Out in some countries, some countries had restrictions to use the name. Tells the story of Jarno Saarinen. It was meant to be a movie, but the length would have been somewhere around 5 or 6 hours. Somewhere in mid of the production it was turned to mini TV series, around 6x45 minutes. The TV series was published in spring 2024 for the first time.

I think it is clearly excellently done, but its Achilles' heel may be its international distribution. Those small companies have hard time to get these available for the general public.


-Jouni
 
My brother in law the not thrilled about riding bikes saw World's fastest Lindian on a flight across The Pasific to a Medical Confrenxe in the USA,yes he isn't keen but not one of those Cotton wool Drs and came home raving to me about what a great film.Yes we need more of that.
 
KERMIT1200 said:
Come along to one of my 4 hour Endurance races and stand in the pit garage, now that's a real life motorcycle movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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I actually very much miss the nights huddled in a blanket on the grandstand opposite the pits at the Spa or le Mans 24h races with a big bottle of red for company.

Spa was especially exciting. The race was often stopped around mid-night due to heavy fog, resulting in a ca. 3am le Mans re-start! Bone-chilling stuff.

piet
 
I too read Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance .......... ( A friend bought a copy and never read it , so I did it for him ... ) ..........

All I remember from it is the search for the definition of " quality " ..... Pirsig`s alter ego " Phaedrus " whom he would become every now and again ...... and how he demonstrated to his BMW riding mate that a squashed Coke can placed under his Honda`s prop stand elevated it to being more than just a mere Coke can ( that bloody search for quality again ) .......... and .................. that`s about it really .................

Pirsig had an IQ of 170 at the age of nine , suffered a mental breakdown in his early `thirties ..... and his son Chris , who went with him on the trip , and I thought had later committed suicide , was actually stabbed to death in a mugging outside a Buddhist Zen centre .........

I feel a movie coming on ..............
 
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I waided through ir as well on my first big ride,6 weeks and 2 nasty crashes lucky only very bad gravel rash the result but I did learn some solid life long riding lesion.Its the hardest book I ever read taking boring to a new level.Profound but boring. In an era before the internet it gave me something to do in one hores towns in outback Quensland on my own especially during the daylyng gravel rash redressing,.To quote Cheach and Chong there ther Mr Motocyclis as the dressing and scab gets pulled off daily you chose to ride in a T shirt as the muffled screaming starts again.Maybe I need to Wright a book on that trip. Probably not.
 
The Sock said:
Robert Redford tried very hard to buy the movie rights to 'Zen and the Art...' but Pirsig refused to sell them.
I treasure my hardback copy and have read it many times.

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Little Faus & Big Halsey showed that Redford wasn’t Steve McQueen. Clint Eastwood riding a Triumph in Coogans bluff showed him as the real deal . Jim Carey was great in Me, myself & Irene & who could forget George Formby in No limits?
 
It`s a shame they never made a proper fist of turning Andy Sparrow`s " Bloodrunners " strip into a decent film .........

Still wouldn`t be relevant as far as the yoof of today is concerned , sadly ........ and it would be impossible to create a real life version of Jack Shit`s Katana ....... or Dom`s Hoover , surely the coolest looking bike that ever ( never ) existed ..............

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Tippie said:
I agree Piet, Worlds fastest Indian is a fantastic film even for people not into bikes.
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Both my mum and dad loved this movie, not a documentary, but very real life.

I am hoping the movie Brad Pitt is making about Isle of Man racing doesn't turn out to be a 'crock of shit'. His movie about Fly Fishing, 'A River Runs Through It', was a huge success for fly-fishing businesses, which is a big deal in many parts of the USA.
 
I tried to read Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I thought it was about motorcycles, but was soon disabused of that notion. To me, it just seemed like a wankfest by the author, Pirsig, waffling on with somewhat disjointed and impenetrable philosophical meanderings. I lost the book when I was about half-way through it. It fell out of my pocket while on a bike ride. I took that as the universe telling me not to bother reading any more. Gawd knows why it got the publicity it did. It's a shit book and would make a shit movie if anyone was deluded enough to consider that.
 
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