Spokane, a city in Washington State in nation's Northwest,
has a sense of whimsy. Someopne risked death or serious injury to install a bicycle, properly wired down, high on an abondoned concrete pier smack dab in Spokane River late last year, leaving residents to speculate as to its installaton and intention. Need life be more mysterious than it is already?
Scenes of gentle folk bicycling pepper biopic Jesus Revolution (Jon Erwin & Brent McCorkle, dirs., 2023). Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie) changes minds and inspires hope when his hippie ideals get applied in church of Pastor Greg Laurie (Kelsey Grammer). Edgar Winter Group’s
Free Ride (1972) naturally fits film score: “I've come here to give you a hand, and lead you into the promised land. So, come on and take a free ride... We gotta do better, it's time to begin. You know all the answers must come from within.” Dramatizes Jesus Freak Movement that coexisted alongside Disco/Drug Inferno of early 1970’s.
Lifetime Network's original film Every Breath She Takes (Darin Scott, dir., 2023) has bicyclist Jules Baker (Tamala Jones) falling for a suave lover, Billy (Brian White). Once married, her savage husband physically and verbally abuses her, so she files for divorce. Crazy to reconcile, stalker Billy sets their home on fire and succumbs in flames. Or does he?
Vraylar Spot has a bipolar bicyclist who buys a child seat at a bike shop, gets a box of cookies at a bakery, then picks up her son from school riding throughout.
Boy scouts bike about in The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, dir., 2022), an autobiographical look at director's teen years. Lends personal authenticity to similar scenes in his blockbusters, like E.T.
Upgrade.com Spot “Bike Shop: Triple Cash Back” (July, 2022), has a couple discussing merits of buying an e-bike as opposed to continuing to ride their debt donkey.
Twicycle has handlebars that its rider can crank to propel bike along with tradition leg twitches.
On Her Own (Fabienne Engel, dir., 2022) documents how Wiebke Lühmann took a month off to go bikepacking 3,500 km solo and unsupported from Hamburg, Germany to North Cape, Norway during height of summer in 2022. On one hand it looked more like winter above Arctic Circle along a gorgeous but rainy route. On other, almost no traffic meant zero human hassles while honking 120 km per 12 hour day, then hunkering against weather overnight.
Carmen (Valerie Buhagiar, dir., 2021) has title character (Natascha McElhone) evicted from church rectory, where she spent her life from teenage as a maid for her brother, a recently deceased pastor of a small Maltese church. Finally free, she embarks on a series of adventures, including learning to ride a bicycle, and surviving by irreverent and unexpected means.
In his Emmy winning documentary Paper and Glue (JR, dir., 2021) humanistic French artist JR celebrates ordinary people and chooses California’s Tehachapi Supermax Prison as another intimate space to plaster giant images on paper producing a collage of incarcerated felons and their families as members of an interconnected society.
Based on Mitali Perkins’s young adult novel, Bangladeshi drama Rickshaw Girl (Amitabh Reza Chowdhury, dir., 2021) introduces feisty teen muralist Naima (Novera Rahman). After her cyclo pedaling father gets injured, mother sends her to a big city to earn money and help family. To escape domestic servitude, she disguises herself as a boy and follows in father’s footsteps as a rickshaw operator. Naima’s creativity doesn’t quit as she still decorates rickshaw and paints murals. Will her emergence as an artist save her?
After most of humanity is wiped out, Elle Fanning happens upon a town’s sole survivor, Peter Dinklage.
I Think We’re Alone Now (Reed Morano, dir., 2018) covers his obsession to bury victims and clean their homes while pocketing valuable resources, particularly batteries. She bikes around contentedly and doesn’t tell him that there are thousands of survivors still living nearby, until a couple who had enslaved her show up to reclaim her.
Parolee Chris Connelly (Jay Duplass) goes for a bike ride with Hildy Beasley (Kaitlyn Dever) after her mom Carol rejects his romantic advances in Canadian indie film Outside In (Lynn Shelton, dir., 2017).
In 1940 on day in question, April 9th (Roni Ezra, dir., 2015), mustered Danish reserve soldiers ask why they were called up, but suspect it’s because Germans were seen gathering at their border. Unit is sent south on bicycles to hold off invaders until reinforcements arrive.
Invisible Sue (Matkus Dietrich, dir., 2012) and her BMX boyfriend ride e-bikes to search for her kidnapped mom.
Stewart Parker’s
Spokesong [Dublin, 1975] is about religious warfare between Catholics and Protestants that has kept this poet/playwright’s homeland, North of Ireland, a battleground for previous 5 decades. While not a musical, a chorus figure, called the Trick Cyclist, who embodies the spirit of Belfast, sings most of its songs. Action takes place in a local bike shop, which among many once solicited sales by employing stunt riders.
Yesteryear’s great black superstar Marshall “Major” Taylor began his record setting career doing exactly that while wearing a military uniform, thus the nickname, in his native city of Indianapolis, before enticed to race by a shop back east, hence also known as “The Worcester Whirlwind”.
