Reviews

Saw this at a sneak preview last night. Overall I enjoyed it, and it held my interest, even though I did not know much about Bert Munro before seeing the movie. I have since read a little bit of his story and the man was even more fascinating than the movie.

The movie was a little slow paced at the beginning, and could have used a little editing to speed things up in places. It is clear that his success came from his mechanical genius, his determination, and from the help of the many friends that he made during his life. That came through in the movie and made me curious about the man behind the movie.

There were a few factual errors, at least according to some other material that I read. Some of the things that the movie has happen during Bert's run at the Salt Flats in Utah did not actually happen that first year, but happened during some of his subsequent visits. Laying the bike down at the end of the run, having his goggles torn off by the wind, and breaking 200 mph, all happened in later years, not that first year. It did make for a more interesting movie to have that "out of time" however.

To be fair, the movie is more sexually explicit than it needs to be to tell its story, otherwise, I'd have rated it higher.

It tells a good story of discrimination between two groups, the Moroccan Jews and the Indian Jews in a tiny town in the desert. It is also about the friendship between two teen-aged girls, Sarah (Indian) and Nicole (Moroccan) in that town. The girls become fast friends despite their differences in personality and their different ethnic backgrounds.

We get the story of a labor dispute at the only employer for both the Moroccans and Indians, and how each group deals with it - the differences separating the two communities, despite their common circumstances, how they try to work together, and again are torn apart.

There is marital infidelity and sexual awakening among both the girls and the boys, how they cope with it, and the emptiness of some of their solutions.

It ends up being both funny and redemptive, in spite of the death of a character.