Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?
This week, witness as a gamer becomes a racer as Neil Blomkamp directs the incredible true story in Gran Turismo. Can Jann Mardenborough use his gaming skills to win the 24 Hours of LeMans... and life?
Motion pictures and automobiles both debuted at around the same time, exciting the public with technologies on technology that could be. Wikipedia has a list of racing films, and its earliest is the 1913 silent film The Speed Kings, starring Fatty Arbuckle. Charlie Chaplin would follow the next year with Kid Auto Races At Venice.
Early racing films, and even some of today, provided viewers with the glimpse of a hobby only affordable by the idle rich. While the recent Ford v Ferrari centered around the common man, the real battle was with Carroll Shelby, Lee Iacocca, and the Ford Corporation.
Racing would provide the backdrop for other things. Racing films can be action, but it can also be a drama, a romance, or a comedy. Kids have enjoyed racing films through anthropomorphic love bugs, an in animation through anthropomorphic cars and snails.
It became a genre embraced globally. Cars could zip across the Italian countrysides or the narrow streets of Monaco, providing viewers with far off destinations they could dream of. Young men in 2001 caught a glimpse of the LA tuner culture with The Fast and the Furious, introducing a sexy nighttime world that they wished they could be a part of.
It became a wish fulfillment fantasy of adrenaline junkies. And it could be a rags to riches story, where a lowly nobody could be a somebody through either hair-trigger reflexes or keen engineering knowhow. Like say … being very good at a racing video game.
Which brings us to today's bonus prompt: what is the best racing in film?
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