"8 Seconds"

In keeping with this week's apparent theme of bull riding, I ordered the movie 8 Seconds a few days ago and it appeared at the post office today, so we popped it in the malfunctioning DVD player and had a look. (I don't know what's wrong with the DVD player, but sometimes you have to give the thing a fairly liberal thump to get it to work. What do you expect for a $30 made-in-China thing? I guess I'm lucky it doesn't leak propylene glycol or spray chips of lead paint at me or poison my dawg with industrial solvents.)

It proved to be a very polite movie. It came to the door and rang the doorbell and said "I'm going to be an entirely conventional movie. I'm going to observe all of the traditions of B-grade American movies, such that when it's all over, everyone will have reconciled with everyone." In short, it came to the house, wiped its feet, took its hat off before coming indoors, and left immediately after it was over without leaving water rings on the coffee table.

The movie is a dramatized biopic of a young bull rider named Lane Frost, who was killed in 1989 at a rodeo in Cheyenne. Immediately after his ride, the bull (named Taking Care of Business) gored Lane in the back, tearing Lane's aorta with the end of a broken rib. Nothing could be done and Lane was dead before he left the arena. This is all true.

I never knew Lane, so I won't presume to guess how the movie did at portraying him. Consult the Lane Frost tribute site at http://www.lanefrost.com/ for all the discussion of Lane Frost and 8 Seconds you'll ever want, though I would describe the Frost family's attitude toward the movie as one of "slightly pained approval".

Nor am I going to say much about the world of bull riding. Thanked in the credits are guys like Tuff Hedeman and Cody Lambert, and they've already forgotten more about the world of bull riding than I'll ever know.

But what I WILL comment on is the fact that most of the 8-second rides actually seemed to take sixteen to twenty seconds. I never got around to timing Tuff Hedeman's 8+8 tribute ride and the National Finals Rodeo because I'd just flat given up by then, but it must surely have been in the thirty second range.

Great movie? Not great, no. But it was polite and respectful of my sensibilities, and there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than watching this movie.

Tomorrow: The Blue Max, I hope, one of my favoritest movies of all time and the reason I get rowdy when people bad-mouth George Peppard.