Motorama

MOTORAMA IS THE NAME OF AN unbelievable contest where the person who manages to collect enough cards from the gas stations owned by Chimera Oil Company wins 500 million dollars. Ten-year-old Gus dreams about winning, rips off a car and begins an odyssey among lunatics, street people and religious monomaniacs - all of them so completely cut off from the world that they don't even understand that Gus is a little child. Soon enough he turns into a precocious child. The film can be described as a dark Bildungs-comedy about the painful learning process resulting in the insight that peace of mind requires tolerance and freedom from fanatism. _
Comment:
A TEN-YEAR-OLD CAR THIEF DRIVES through a decaying US of A. He's left a dull childhood behind with two embittered parents who neither love themselves nor each other. He's on his way to the big break! First, he's going to win the Motorama contest, then his luck will meet no boundaries. This is all he knows. With the help of a pillow and leg extensions he steps on the gas in his freshly stolen red Mustang. ¤Highway to Hell'' is blasting on the radio.
A dead man is thrown into a stream by two indifferent strangers. His brain tissue blends with his blood in the crystal clear water and whirls away with the current. Like in a Tarkovsky movie we can see the bottom of the river covered with empty Coca-Cola bottles, broken ignition plugs, old posters and othcr remnants from the American Way of Life. Downstream the ten-year-old is washing off the travel dust. He clears his tired cyes with the river water and the film can begin for real.
We're sucked into a surrealist nightmare together with the ten -year-old; its outline rcminds us of America. In a world where all those who are post-puberty appcars to be chronically disturbed and where psychopathology is spreading as rapid as the flu, the only way to go is downhill. The only way out of this inferno is through the dream about the great break: you're free first when you've gathered Infinite amounts of money and beautiful women to enjoy under the shades of the palms on an Ocean beach. The ongoing nightmare, however, is so insane that only the most innocent have the ability left to dream. The mental short circuit has made it so that nobody helps anyone - no one can see the others. All appears blinded by the gencral competition for life space. The dream is an illusion, the nightmare reality.
Believe it or not! This is an American film with profound social criticism, presenting the American dream as fraud, its only function to prevent people from realizing how hellish they live. In short, not a film for people who're afraid of being robbed of their illusions about ''the home of the free'' on earth, or the blessings of market economy. Neither is it a movie for those who love social realism. But, if you like road-movies, spiced with pitch dark irony, you're not going to be disappointed - that is, unless you're allergic to films with a political edge. _
ERIK TÄNGERST AD

Medverkande
Jordan Christopher Michael, John Diehl: Producent
Donald P. Borchers: Manus
Joseph Minion: Foto
Joseph Yacoe: Musik
Andy Summers: Talat språk
English