I cringed the whole time through. Felt like a cinematic circle jerk of four self obsessed bikers and a director who's stupid enough to not be at least a little bit critical and put things in perspective.
The structure of the narrative is ridiculous and boring; every single step of the event is explained four times through the eyes of every biker. Four times of people grumbling about how awful their jobs are and how they love their bikes more than anything in the world, we all got the cliché point the first time around, let alone watch the same message four freaking times. The 'climax', being the race itself, is an awfully stretched narrative and lost all its momentum and the small bit of suspense that it might have had. At that point I was actively hoping none of them would succeed in their goals.
Because besides a director who doesn't know what he's doing, very bad writing and cliché one liners, these displayed people were so awfully irritating. They possessed no self deprecating humour and only talked about themselves and their bikes as godlike superior things. They were glorifying each other and believed every single word they were saying. It was so uncomfortable watching this unmasked ball licking and deluded interviews. Unironic quotes as 'Nobody does it because they don't have the balls' and 'Our names belong in the history books' cringed the s*** out of me. Instead of adjectives as 'passionate', 'driven' and 'camaraderie', this film shoots immediately to 'arrogant', 'self-obsessed' and 'grandiloquence'. Thing is that a good documentary should be able to pull in an audience with any subject by making an interesting narrative, interesting characters and an interesting cinematography. A good documentary should make an audience excited about the rarest and most difficult of subjects. This film makes biking a seemingly nerdy obsession of some weird cocky and frustrated guys. Now, I know that can't be true and that the film wants to do the opposite, but yet, it reinforces this idea. And it's not just me. Every single person in the audience of the screening of April 16th (10 people) had the same feeling. Three of them, one of which was actually a biker, ran out of the screening way before the ending. He just couldn't bear it.
Biking already has the connotation of being part of a very macho culture and this movie even tops that. In about 60 minutes in the film, it shows female bikers only 3 times, 2 times of which the focus of the shot are boobs and the other time ass. The director must have realised that at some point 'cause towards the end there is a small and completely out of context small interview with a female biker but it doesn't make up for the blatant sexism.
The last point I want to make about this film is the lack of continuity in cinematography. It feels very eclectic because of the lots of different used cameras and the very visible variable quality of the images. Some of the shots were so bad in quality I thought it was shot on an iPhone. Also, the amount of time lapses of the Bonneville lake were too many and too dense. They aren't nicely spread through the narrative but just thrown at the audience without thinking.
Normally I don't bother with writing reviews about films. I just tag them for later personal reference and go on about my day. But having seen this absolute turd of a movie and then reading positive IMDb reviews and ratings written by probably people who were involved in the project, I felt the need to let the world know this movie is the worst.
The structure of the narrative is ridiculous and boring; every single step of the event is explained four times through the eyes of every biker. Four times of people grumbling about how awful their jobs are and how they love their bikes more than anything in the world, we all got the cliché point the first time around, let alone watch the same message four freaking times. The 'climax', being the race itself, is an awfully stretched narrative and lost all its momentum and the small bit of suspense that it might have had. At that point I was actively hoping none of them would succeed in their goals.
Because besides a director who doesn't know what he's doing, very bad writing and cliché one liners, these displayed people were so awfully irritating. They possessed no self deprecating humour and only talked about themselves and their bikes as godlike superior things. They were glorifying each other and believed every single word they were saying. It was so uncomfortable watching this unmasked ball licking and deluded interviews. Unironic quotes as 'Nobody does it because they don't have the balls' and 'Our names belong in the history books' cringed the s*** out of me. Instead of adjectives as 'passionate', 'driven' and 'camaraderie', this film shoots immediately to 'arrogant', 'self-obsessed' and 'grandiloquence'. Thing is that a good documentary should be able to pull in an audience with any subject by making an interesting narrative, interesting characters and an interesting cinematography. A good documentary should make an audience excited about the rarest and most difficult of subjects. This film makes biking a seemingly nerdy obsession of some weird cocky and frustrated guys. Now, I know that can't be true and that the film wants to do the opposite, but yet, it reinforces this idea. And it's not just me. Every single person in the audience of the screening of April 16th (10 people) had the same feeling. Three of them, one of which was actually a biker, ran out of the screening way before the ending. He just couldn't bear it.
Biking already has the connotation of being part of a very macho culture and this movie even tops that. In about 60 minutes in the film, it shows female bikers only 3 times, 2 times of which the focus of the shot are boobs and the other time ass. The director must have realised that at some point 'cause towards the end there is a small and completely out of context small interview with a female biker but it doesn't make up for the blatant sexism.
The last point I want to make about this film is the lack of continuity in cinematography. It feels very eclectic because of the lots of different used cameras and the very visible variable quality of the images. Some of the shots were so bad in quality I thought it was shot on an iPhone. Also, the amount of time lapses of the Bonneville lake were too many and too dense. They aren't nicely spread through the narrative but just thrown at the audience without thinking.
Normally I don't bother with writing reviews about films. I just tag them for later personal reference and go on about my day. But having seen this absolute turd of a movie and then reading positive IMDb reviews and ratings written by probably people who were involved in the project, I felt the need to let the world know this movie is the worst.