Breaking Away

Would you like to see a little picture of where we live?  Find and watch the movie: Breaking Away.  

I want to talk about it in more detail than I can without giving away too much of the story line.  It's based in and around Bloomington and the Indiana University campus (here in Bloomington) in 1979.  Dennis Quaid is one of the young actors.  He manages to come across as a fairly angry sort, I didn't enjoy his performance very much.  If I were to give an award for best actor, it would be to Dennis Christopher.  He's gorgeous, naive, funny, true to his friends.  I guess I'm unsold on whether the award would go to him or to the person who wrote his character but surely a lot of it was him.  The little 500, a historically important bike race at IU, is a big feature of the film, and more specifically, the inequalities between townies (or 'cutters' as they were called back then) and the students.  It felt very appropriate for me with all this talk on democracy I've been doing with a couple of my classes.  Oh, and the scenery is just what I see every day so if you find this movie, you won't even have to come visit, you'll see it all there.  I guess it's the 1979 version of what we see and walk in, but it's very similar.

Watch it, if you can find it, and tell me what you think.