Review of Madison

I am a racing fan and a child of the American hot rod culture--my Dad built race-and-championship-winning auto engines for Chevy and Ford in the late Sixties and early Seventies--and I really enjoyed this movie as a chronicle of an exciting race and what a story--the small-town sponsored the boat and got the win at its own race. Beautiful. I appreciate those who have posted corrections to factual errors in the movie, but I would suggest that any race fan critical of this should step back and enjoy the show and what it got right--and it got a lot right. I particularly enjoyed seeing the one kid in an STP windbreaker. I had one, too, back then and I wore it with pride. STP meant racing and racing was my thing. Not football or baseball or anything else. And, for sure, the son of the boat racer riding his Sting-Ray with the stick-shift and high-rise bars and all--that is what kids did back then, rode their bikes and pretended they were racing. And thanks to some crazy kids and their parents and some promoters in Southern California who took it a step further, the sport of BMX was born in that era. (And if you are a fan of that, you have to see the documentary Joe Kid on a Sting-Ray, just the best.) I really enjoyed this movie--a feel-good racing movie in the same mold as The World's Fastest Indian.