In celebration of: Breaking Away

INI FOODZ

Paul Dooley, Barbara Barrie (as Dennis Christopher's parents) and Dennis Quaid's torso are great in this.

i would move to Bloomington on the basis of this movie.

aw man, yeah, the parents are incredible!

q:how are you?
a:a little concerned about the developments in the middle east, but doing alright otherwise

all time classic response, the fact that it was said by marv from home alone is icing

I have biked to Bloomington, but never seen this movie.

some of Dooley's line readings are great ("I don't care if the Second Comin's comin'").

written by Steve Tesich, who died very young (about 40?).

my dad loves it so much i bought it for him but now i sorta wish i kept it for myself lol.

well not as young as I thought -- 53.

anything with the creepy jackie earle haley is worth watching
http://www.stuckinthe70s.com/images/teenbeat0978jackie.jpg

he was just an all-purpose runt.

iirc I Love To Ride My Bicycle decided this was inferior to AMERICAN FLYERS, written by the same dude

yeah, i looked up the director's career on imdb. he did mother, jugs, and speed, and bullit, and some episodes of "the saint", and fucking krull

beyond that, his resume is fuckall to me

what's up with that?

one of my favorite films from the seventies is "Harry in Your Pocket". I don't think the guy who did that did anything else. what's up with that? this underachieving class...

Laurel, that's awesome. Check out the movie at some point.

It is my goal to go to the quarry swimming hole before this summer is over.

my dad loves it so much i bought it for him but now i sorta wish i kept it for myself lol.

aw

i always wanted to go to that rock quarry

yes! how could you not?!

http://www.gibsonraces.com/cliff_me.jpg

Peter Yates did the splendid and hard-to-see Bob Mitchum crime film The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

yeah, can we use this thread as a peter yates s&d?

Dennis Christopher has aged ... a lot. Showed up on 6 Ft Under & Deadwood in recent years.

yeah, it brings to mind seeing Lance Kerwin of "James at 15" fame talking about how he became a born-again Christian or some such

I've heard that this was supposed to be shot in the town I now live in (Columbia MO) but they couldn't get permission to do it. There are quarry swimming holes here. In fact, everything about this movie resembles Columbia, MO.

An old housemate of mine grew up in Columbia, and somehow, given the context, (deliberate ambiguity) that all makes perfect sense.

shaving legs scene is the best

yesss!

love this movie. paul dooley in particular. and daniel stern (sort of rehearsing his character in diner).

An old housemate of mine grew up in Columbia, and somehow, given the context, (deliberate ambiguity) that all makes perfect sense.

oh, also, i didn't mean that parenthetical thing to sound sinister or pejorative in the least. she was totally rad. i just mean, there's this midwest heartland vibe that is maybe too much to go into within the context of ilxxxxxxxxxxxx

Tesich's background was at IU, so I'd be surprised if Bloomington-area locations weren't the first choice.

yeah, no, it was totally filmed in Bloomington, as far as I know, and it's a huge credit to him insofar as how awesome it turned out to be visually. Again, I would move to (1979-era, anyhow) Bloomington on the basis of this film. Laid-back greenery and some academia surruonds. I don't ask for much in life.

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/1413.html

Dell, I read you loud and clear. That kind of thing is very pervasive around here. Yeah, Morbs, I can't corroborate the story. The indie theater got a print of this back in their opening summer and touted that story.

is there really that much of a difference between bloomington and columbia??

i mean i grew up in princeton nj and it could have been set there pretty easily too. or new brunswick nj. or most any college town ive ever been in.

yeah i would be really surprised if a college town in MO and one in IN were not really similar.

I'm sure there isn't much of a difference, I've never spent much time in Bloomington. But that doesn't mean this movie was going to be shot here.

but they lack stone quarries in Princeton -- don't they?

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&q=the+quarry+princeton&fb=1&cid=14975279182817440383&li=lmd&t=h&ll=40.378997,-74.776675&spn=0.001279,0.002285&z=19

but that wasnt really my point--substitute quarry in bloomington for whatever local spot you want

I don't think anyone would argue that there aren't similarities between these college towns. What's disputable is the choice of Columbia as a locale for this particular film. The guys behind the indie theater made that claim, that's all I remember. I don't know where they heard the story.
The Quarry swimming holes in Missouri are the best, though. Better than any in Indiana or Jersey.

Team Cinzano's comin to town!

Bump because it's time we all rewatched Breaking Away and praised it some more. Everyone put it in your instant queues and report back.

Great editing as well, it's a near perfectly paced film on top of everything else.

In light of Peter Yates' passing. (And the fact that Shakey Mo has apparently never seen it.)

Watched this for the first time last night on a whim, to chase away PSH RIP gloom. It's so wonderful! Great performances, great script, wonderful cinematography!

I saw this right when it came out, and I don't think I ever watched it a second time until now. So it's hard to remember exactly what I thought in 1979; probably that it was basically likeable but slight.

A film like this wouldn't have had much of a chance with me then. I was 18 and just about to start studying film at university, so it was Scorsese and Manhattan and the '70s American films, and also Fassbinder and the film-school stuff. I was so much older then, etc.

I was also escaping a small town myself, and while I was nothing like the university people here, I was definitely, in my mind, leaving behind the Mikes and Cyrils of my own high school. Again, not the right moment to appreciate this. So I missed how good it is on class. My first-year roommate was actually from a small town in Indiana (Bluffton), so he got that--I remember talking about the film with him.

Dennis Quaid is excellent. It's the kind of performance that most times I'd say they didn't give the character any shading, didn't allow him some scenes where he isn't sour and angry. But the intensity of Quaid's hatred of the university crowd is something to see. And there's subtlety in how they bring Hart Bochner around towards the end

Very funny, of course. Favourite line from Paul Dooley: "Be careful--the next word you say may be your last."

also "I don't care if the Second Comin's comin'."

Dooley is married to the creator of My So-Called Life, who is 25+ years his junior. (He was on Thirtysomething when she wrote/produced on it.)

I tried to watch A Perfect Couple once--same year as Breaking Away--and didn't get very far.

My dad's in the bike business, so when this came out, it was a big deal for him. We went to see this a bunch of times when I was a kid. I remember liking it, but don't remember much else. It's been on my netflix queue for a while now, but I haven't gotten around to watching it, maybe need to change that.

I also think my wife may relate to it because she's from Indiana, went to IU, and stayed in Bloomington for several years after graduating.

can i just repeat what i said above, that i loved this movie to bits

Some college student should write a paper comparing Mike in Breaking Away, Milner in American Graffiti, and Wooderson in Dazed and Confused. Don't know if that's enough for an archetype--any other movie characters belong in that group?

this movie is awesome. my high school theology teacher (i went to an all-male jesuit school) showed this in class, i have no idea why. i can't remember. but all of us really liked it

i understand Doctor Casino saw this last week

i wish i'd never seen this movie, so i could see it for the first time again

they filled in the quarry :(

i saw this for the first time a couple of years ago and loved it so much

It got an oscar nomination for best picture and I was genuinely disappointed when it didn't win, when ordinarily I wouldn't have cared a jot one way or another what film won.

tesich did a great great job on this, an in a way, it is the opposite or inverse of the wonderful book _The Rider_, by Tim Krabbe (who wrote _The Vanishing_). Breaking Away is invincible because it captures a fringe-sport nerd sucked up by the love of his sport, but is not _at all_ about the sport. The Rider is great because it is utterly and completely otmfm about what it feels like to be obsessed with racing your bike, within an actual race.

Now that cycling is not a fringe-weirdo sport, i dont know how these opinions translate but yeah- Breaking Away is all time.

also i live in CO and hang with mostly weirdos, so if it is still a fringe-weirdo sport, i wouldnt know, but from the dif reactions of my fam between the late 80s and now, it’s not at all weirdo, it’s just a thing like...uh, quilting or hot-rodding a car or book club.

Better than Star Wars and The Deer Hunter

Lenny is 'unwatched' AND 'meh'?

Just “meh” for Fiddler? :(

BA is precisely the kind of movie that wins the original screenplay Oscar and nothing else.

I'd like to thank Dennis Quaid's abs for making me gay(er).

<3