Saturday, October 08, 2005

Madison (the DVD)

A few years ago, I more or less promised myself that I would stop watching sports movies because they all have the same premise. However when I heard about that the movie Madison was about Hydroplanes, I knew this was one that I had to see.
When I moved to Seattle for the first time in 1982, the world stopped during Seafair. Everybody in town talked about Hydroplanes. It was not hard to wonder why Seattle is a sea town and Boeing was the only big show in town. The thunder boats were the perfect marriage of jet engines and water. Now that more people living in the area are from somewhere else and we have Microsoft, Starbucks and the Mariners are fairly successful or at least have been in the past, the boats have totally lost their stanglehold.
Anyway the film is not about Seattle but about Madison Indiana, a small town that hosts the Madison Regatta and sponsors the Miss Madison boat. The boat is the laughing stock of the circuit and the town is dying. However former driver Jim McCormick stumbles on some luck when Madison gets drawn to host the Gold Cup. What follows next is a series of misteps, bad luck as Jim has to sell both the town on the race, and the circuit on the town. It's sort of fitting now that the circuit seems to be in the same shape that Madison was in that movie.

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