Premium Rush; keeps you on the edge of the saddle

I don't know if Premium Rush is going to work as well for everyone else as it did for me, because not everyone is crazy enough to ride a pushbike in city traffic. When I started doing it again 10 years back, fresh back from a exhilarating stay in a part of the world where everyone kept asking me why I wasn't worried about the carbombs, it took about three weeks before I decided that for this, life insurance was appropriate. Last Christmas I celebrated something like three years without an accident, though I marked it the way you always do, by having an accident. You don't notice the run of luck or mark its length until it ends. Concussion is no fun. Being too dumb to wear a helmet; well, luckily, I didn't wind up too dumb to cut my own food, leave it at that.

Anyhow, watching people do scary things on bikes; that gets my attention. Since most people who don't ride bikes tend to hate cyclists - especially bike couriers - the rest of the audience may well have been rooting for Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to fall under a bus. What I'm saying is, this may not grab everyone the same way it grabbed me. But, if you're prepared to root for the guy you usually swear at, Premium Rush is about as much fun as you can have at a movie, and more fun than anything I've seen in a cinema all year. 

It's not exactly cerebral; a lot of the action scenes happen just so that people - mostly Wilee - can do cool things on bikes, and in dumber hands this would have been a pretty mediocre movie with a load of bike stunts. But in a development which almost makes me optimistic about Hollywood, someone finally seems to have got the memo about how small stakes and ordinary people can work better than big stakes, if you just take the time to write some decent characters and hire good actors to play them. The writer and director keep everything small and simple, and very easy for the audience to relate to. And so, when Wilee throws himself into traffic, it makes sense and it's scary as a ton of explosions, because in the real world getting something wrong by three inches in traffic is serious business. Most halfway sane people don't even like riding sedately in the bike lane, so most halfway sane people can look at what Wilee is doing and form a pretty good picture of how terrified they'd be. That gets your attention in a way that zombies and vampires are never going to. I spent a lot of the movie alternately shrinking back in my seat and laughing out loud as Wilee headed into something risky and somehow came out the other side. Winningly, Gordon-Levitt let out a little chuckle of his own after most of the real hairy stuff, which was a clever touch.

I ought to make a moment for Gordon-Levitt here because the guy is on fire at the moment. The popular theory is that he's picking all the good roles, but I think the truth is that he's making the good roles. Wilee could have been nothing very much with a different actor (his principal rival in the biking game is adequate, no more, and it's all too easy to imagine Wilee being not much better in other hands). Gordon-Levitt brings him to life without doing anything very obvious or easy to understand. Years ago, Pauline Kael described the difference between De Niro and James Caan as being "With de Niro, you think "Something's eating him." and with Caan you think "He's eating something. Pizza?", and I think Kael would have seen that same de Niro quality to Gordon-Levitt; he's good at being a smart guy trying to do a smart thing (though I saw him at the weekend in The Lookout playing a guy who used to be smart and then took a massive blow to the head, and he's just as good at being someone who can remember being smart but isn't really smart any more).

The plot is so old Hitchcock would have been blowing dust off it; hero has McGuffin, must bring it from A to B while villains of various kinds frustrate him. This is a great plot done right, and it's perfectly adequate in Premium Rush; Wilee is having a bad day, his girlfriend is dumping him, and he gets one last messenger job to drop a package in Chinatown. Meanwhile Michael Shannon's Detective Monday is having a much worse day, and needs to get hold of the same package if he's to salvage anything from it. Since Shannon is broadly playing an idiot with impulse control issues, what ensues is less a battle of wits and more a collision between a sharp, isolated and incredibly flimsy David and a dumb Goliath. Shannon is making a bit of a habit of playing law enforcement officers with control issues, but Detective Monday is nothing like as layered and compelling as Nelson van Alden in Boardwalk Empire. Though Wilee is explicitly compared to the Road Runner, Monday gives the impression that the Coyote called in sick and they had to send Elmer Fudd. 

It's huge fun. Wilee is bedevilled not just by Monday, but by rival messengers stealing his jobs, the girlfriend he can't understand and one lone NYPD bike patrolman who keeps having to peel himself off car doors and landscape as Wilee narrowly eludes arrest for all the accidents he's causing while he tries to stay one step ahead of Monday. At first it isn't obvious that Monday even is a cop, and wonderfully the movie resists any temptation to make him just part of some hideous conspiracy of crooked cops; Monday's just a lone clod who's got in over his head. As Einstein said, everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. 

I can even forgive the film a tricksy time scheme which keeps jumping into flashback, because, for the most part, the plot's so simple that the best way to keep it usefully murky is to keep jumping back to other bits rather than tell everything in the order it happened. And the computer graphic gimmicks of working out routes and the safest way through traffic snarls is done just enough to be cool, but not so much that it wears out its welcome. In fact, it's used cleverly enough that the last time it comes up, it actually manages to deliver a clever little shock to something which - thanks to the fact that the move actually begins with it - we knew was coming. 

Above all and everything else, it's just a nice little movie which picks one thing to do and then does it very well. I could do with a lot more of that kind of thinking.

bang, wallop, ouch

Black ice is a wonderful thing. Inconspicuous, but full of excitement
I mean, you can't see it. I should have been looking out for it, but late at night, yards from home, you get complacent. Then you sweep into the last corner before you get to the house, and the back wheel pulls away and the whole bike starts to slide sideways and in an almost elegant movement you're sliding along the road, thinking "this ain't too bad". There no traffic, so you're not worried, and there's no pain yet. The slide stops and you're lying there on the road, almost comfortable, buffered in layers of wool and leather and the shoulder bag has swung clear so that you didn't land on it and hurt your back. Clack, the helmet bounces off the road beside you because you didn't think of cinching on the chin strap before you set out. Clack, the second bounce and you look up to see the man walking his dog beside you, wanting to know if you're OK. Still, it all feels wonderfully comfortable. It's going to take a second or two to get your breath back, but really it's not been at all bad as uncontrolled skids late at night go.

You struggle out from under the bike, realising that the bad leg has taken the hit and that this may not be as much fun as it felt like a few moments ago, and you stagger upright. It's fine, it's fine.

It's not.

Luckily the house is only yards away. You hobble the bike back to where it belongs, and let yourself in. AM is back a little while and is predictably bothered, but it still all feels manageable.

In the morning, not so much. The ten feet from the bed to the bathroom is an ordeal. Getting down the stairs takes thought. Going to work is not even an option. The right leg won't take your weight, won't straighten out fully. And you had plans for today and no real way to fill the time just sitting at home.

The bike is fine. How long it's going to be before I ride it again is still up for grabs.

With the bike healthy, other themes emerge

The bike is not, of course, really healthy. I did finally get it back and it seemed fine for almost a whole day. It wasn't. The axle nuts on the back wheel were not tight enough and the wheel shifted in the frame until it jammed against it. This is why i carry a set of spanners, but maybe there's no need. As I squatted beside the machine trying to puzzle out its latest tantrum - for it was not quite as obvious to me at first what was wrong as the summary above might imply - a passer by asked me if I had all the tools I needed, or should he go over to his house nearby and bring some back. I always expect people to be kind, but even by my standards this was remarkable. It cheered me up no end as I twiddled away with the axle nuts. It nearly took my mind off my pathological unwillingness to go next or near axle nuts. Tightening and loosening them is fraught with problems, because doing it wrong will overtighten the secondary nuts which hold the wheel bearing cones. And if you tighten them too much, the wheel bearings seize, the hub burns through and your front wheel will collapse unexpectedly as you're riding along Griffith Avenue one afternoon, and you will get covered in all kinds of bruises.

That was more than twenty years ago and I'm still brooding on it. They were big bruises. And at the time I didn't have the kind of money which allowed me to go ho-hum, a busted wheel, I must go round to the bike shop and get them to fix it. The trip to Charlie's on that occasion ate all the spare money I had for the month.

But for the moment at least the bike is behaving itself and my thoughts move to other things.

Is there any end to fixing bicycles?

Because you have to start somewhere, and for the last week it seems like every day has had a spanner in it.

It all started simply enough when the right hand shifter broke. It's not as though I have any grounds for complaint. The shifter is as old as the rest of the bike, which has spent 13 years being left out in all weathers with no maintenance. One look told me that it had run its course - I thought it had held up pretty well when you counted in that four of its years had been spent in the salt laden humidity of Tel Aviv.

So down to my local bike shop, and dust off the backup machine, which is horrible, but younger and less rotted by salt water. Took the bike shop until the following Thursday to fix the problem, which was all down to the fact that in Dublin today no-one repairs anything; so no-one, not even an otherwise oldfashioned family run bike shop, stocks spare parts any more. It took a couple of days to get the parts and I had to weather some polite incredulity that I was willing to spend the money to buy them rather than forget about the idea - suddenly I started to see why every second lamp-post in Dublin seems to have a broken bike chained to it. Why bother? Leave it locked, walk away and buy a new one.

The new shifters were wonderful. Of course, I'd wound up having to replace both of them. The parts come in pairs. And index shifters are now all built into the brake levers. So I had new brake levers too. And the shop had retaped the handlebars.

Is it just that having something new on something old makes all the old bits seem so much older, or was it simply that having something that worked properly left me with no illusions about what didn't work? By the following morning it was worryingly clear that my brakes had all the stopping power of nicotine gum. A lunchtime job, I thought. I could nip out on my break and fine tune the blocks. In the clear light of day, I could lie to myself no longer - my brake blocks didn't need fine tuning, they needed junking. Down to the nearest bike shop after work and pay more money than seemed plausible for four new blocks. But the next bit would be easy, of course. How hard would it be to replace four brake blocks, even if it was after dark and starting to rain?

Executive summary; hard. The locking nut is on the back of the brake arm. The stamped steel spanners you get with a bike and keep because they're BIKE spanners won't fit into the space - or if one of them does, it will turn one seventh of a turn and now you can't line the stupid little stamped hole up with the new position of the nut.

I'm doing all this in the rain outside Neary's with Chris looming over me, looking concerned but irrelevant. Scissors are about the limit of Chris' ability with moving parts. It had all seemed fine when I planned it; if I'm meeting Chris for a pint at six, and I run out of the office at five fifteen, that's a whole forty five minutes to buy the blocks, get to Neary's and do the spanner work. Finally, after much swearing, it gets done. In the narrow sense that you can't really stop the job in the middle, but you can't get it done properly with the wrong tools in bad light.

All the way through the weekend I kept telling myself to revisit the fix and make sure that everything was placed right and working the way it should. But there's always something else that's going to be more fun than going out in the cold and getting your hands dirty.

So it got looked at again on Monday, which was when I discovered that the brake arm was seized. Couldn't free it, and I suppose it must have been like that for a long time. Back to the shop. Everything you need to know about my mechanical cluelessness - the guys asked me if the cable had snapped. In their minds, I'm essentially blonde. Of course, this could be based on the fact that I get them to fix my punctures. I got slightly more respect when I showed them the actual problem. And perhaps I'll get the bike back tomorrow morning - couldn't get through to them on the phone today.

And in the meantime, I'm back on the backup, which meant I started fretting about ITS brakes, and spent yesterday replacing all the blocks on it. With the right spanner, this time.

Presumably at some point I will have replaced everything on the bike and it will work perfectly. And I'll probably have spent more money keeping it going than it would have cost to buy a cheap bike with better specs. It just seems wrong to junk a bike when the frame's still sound.

What's next? Saving String?