B.I.K.E. 2006 123movies

Watch: B.I.K.E. 2006 123movies, Full Movie Online – An exploration of the Black Label Bicycle Club and the wider tallbike subculture that has grown up around it. Comprised mainly of artists driven by anti-materialism and a belief that the impending apocalypse will render cars useless and bicycles in power, BLBC battles mainstream consumer culture and rival gangs for its vision of a better tomorrow. The film chronicles the trials of co-director Anthony Howard as he tries to become a member of the club.
Plot: Two filmmakers infiltrate an underground bicycle club.
Smart Tags: #bicycle #anti_materialism #extreme_sports #entire_title_is_capitalized_acronym #acronym_in_title #punk_rock #jousting

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Ratings:

	6.8/10 Votes: 90
	N/A | RottenTomatoes
	N/A | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 1 Popularity: 1.17 | TMDB

Reviews:

would have been nice if it were about BIKE GANGS!
B.I.K.E. is a documentary that follows the exploits of Black Label Bicycle Gang. I had heard of Black Label before seeing this film, to sum them up, they are a group of Crust Punks who think the best way of defeating capitalism is to weld bikes together and ride them in front of SUVs. As you can guess the second I learned of this I wanted to join up, but I lack welding skills and have a fear of falling from tall heights, plus I don’t live near any Hipster infected Cities.

Anyway I’m not reviewing the Gang I’m reviewing the documentary about the Gang. I’ll say this; I quite liked the parts that were ACTUALLY ABOUT THE BIKE GANG! Dam, if you’re going to make a documentary about something make sure the focus is on the something you’re documenting. The protagonist (I didn’t know documentaries could have protagonists, but this one seemed to) is Anthony Howard, called Tony. Tony is a pathetic Hipster Druggy who decides to hang out with Black Label members because he eats out of dumpsters and lives in an apartment covered in graffiti, like most Black Label Members.

Now I have nothing ageist Dumpster Divers or Squatters, in fact I very much support them in their Anti-Consumerist pursuits, but Tony is a whiney, gangstar talking Dumpster Diving Squatter. The movie decided to following him around, including the part where he melts down because his girlfriend runs off with some British dude (wait is that a spoiler? I didn’t know you could Spoil a DOCUMENTARY). What does Tony’s girlfriend’s disloyalty have to do with Vegan Artist riding Freakishly Tall Bikes in Critical Mass?

I like Bike Culture, I like Bikes, I like this idea of Bike Gangs riding together and stuff. But this film didn’t make me want to join Black Label. Most of the Black Label members they interviewed in this film struck me as the kind of Activist Kids who will give it up in ten years to become Suburban Yuppies. But I don’t know any of these people personally, nor am I a member of Black Label so I don’t really know if they are really into what they preach or if they’re just having fun, the film makes it look like the later of the two. If there was a Black Label chapter in Morgantown I would check it out at the very least, and tell them how much I hated this film.

I’ll give it 3 stars for the parts I actually liked, but that’s grateful.

“Almost all of us aren’t from here.”
You don’t say?

Those were the words (more or less, I may be paraphrasing a little bit) which came out of the mouth of one of the members of the New York chapter of the Black Label Bike Club, a group of sniveling overgrown children who like to ride around Brooklyn on ridiculously tall bikes and like, you know, get f*cked up and sh*t. This group, which is like a red-headed bastard step-child to the original chapter (which is based out of Minneapolis) is shown on screen embarrassing themselves in all sorts of ways. One of the main characters in this saga is a guy named Tony, from bourgeois suburban Portland, ME. This thoroughly white bread upper middle class punk, in his late twenties, moved to New York some years prior (when exactly is unspecified) to the filming of this movie, and quickly acquired a wiggerish demeanor, and ran with a crowd, based largely out of the Bushwick neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. When he’s wasn’t making an ass out himself pretending to be black, Tony found a way to ingratiate himself with one of the more flamboyant members of the B.L.B.C., this guy names Doyle. He has earned a reputation as one of the foremost Tall Bike Jousters in the world. Yes, these idiots actually get up on bikes that are like ten feet off the ground and joust each other. Not unsurprisingly, some of these people ended up in the back of ambulances after hitting their heads on the hard pavement during said sport. So anyway, Tony and Doyle are buddies and Doyle is trying to get Tony into the club, but a lot of the members think that Tony’s too much of a drug addled idiot to be an asset to the club. The main dramatic arc of the film is Tony’s struggle for acceptance amongst the super-hip Black Labels (the group received lucrative TV offers from MTV and the Discovery Channel, to name a couple of the giant corporations eager to cash in on the Bike Club Culture mystique, and the Black Label Bike Club in particular.)

We follow the crew around the country and around the world. In one sequence, the NY chapter heads out to Minneapolis (by car, by the way; what the hell?) for some sort of annual ride (which is kinda like Sturgis, except much, much lamer.) Eventually, all the chapters from around the country (including, in addition to Minneapolis and New York, Austin, Reno and a “nomadic” chapter called Nowhere) get together in the woods at some National Park and party down. The tension between the old-school original chapter members from Minneapolis and the new-school, art-school educated hipster elite Brooklyn chapter members is so thick you can cut it with a knife, nicely coming to a head when a drunken Tony (not even a member, but rolling with Brooklyn) stumbles out of the woods bare-ass naked and proceeds to displease one of the founders of the original chapter, not to mention pretty much everyone else.

After this debacle in the woods, Tony is told bluntly by Doyle that there are many members, even in the New York chapter, who are opposed to him joining the group. Meanwhile, Doyle plots to ride a home-made rocket bike (presumably with fuel left over from the road trip to Minnesota) through the streets at the club’s annual giant underground party.

Doyle and dejected Tony proceed to fly (on a jetliner filled with gasoline) to Amsterdam for the “world championship” of bike jousting. It’s funny how they eat from the dumpsters (not that I’m opposed to that, per se) but they can afford to fly to Europe to take part in something so frivolous as an unofficial bike jousting tournament (the guy who runs it looks like Tommy Chong in 20 years with dreads.) Well, after a night of hard drinking in Amsterdam, Tony gets his ass kicked for trying to steal a bottle of booze from some Dutchmen and ends up, essentially, breaking up with Doyle (theirs’ was a bromance for the ages.) After they go back to NY, Doyle continues working on his jet bike, and Tony runs of to his parent’s house in Maine to sulk and lay off the ‘Ron for a while. Tony’s father, a professor, is rather amusing giving analytical analysis of the group which his son has been spurned from.

Eventually, Tony returns to NY to plot his vengeance, by recruiting some of his other bike culture reject buddies into his newly-formed bike club. They plan to crash the party where Doyle will be riding his rocket bike, and challenge the Black Labels to a jousting match. It’s all rather Arthurian towards the end. Long story short, Tony embarrasses himself… again, and Doyle rides his rocket bike into glory.

While I found the subjects of this film to be by and large distasteful to the extreme, that didn’t take away from the film itself, which tells a fairly captivating tale on several different levels. As a document of cutting edge hipsterism, this will surely be invaluable to future historians and sociologists. As a simply human tale, this movie also succeeds fairly well, hitting as it does on some age-old truths about human social behaviors and the desire of acceptance by a group of one’s peers. In this regard, Tony deserves some credit for the bravery it must have taken to allow himself to be portrayed on screen in such a pathetic light (he was one of the directors of the film.) Perhaps he can grow up a little now that he has thoroughly humiliated himself for the world to see. All in all, a good look at an annoying subculture.

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 29 min (89 min) (USA)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated N/A
Genre Documentary
Director Anthony Howard, Jacob Septimus
Writer N/A
Actors Waugh Amanda, Jennifer Bezak, Conrad Carlson
Country United States
Awards N/A
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Stereo
Aspect Ratio 1.33 : 1
Camera N/A
Laboratory N/A
Film Length N/A
Negative Format N/A
Cinematographic Process N/A
Printed Film Format N/A