I don't want to be totally negative. And, in contrast to the 'headline' of my post, MASH is a very enjoyable 60 minute music video compilation of some sick fixed gear riding... but it wasn't what I expected it to be at all.

Fixed gear riding and bike messenger culture is still very much a mystery to large swaths of the public. In San Francisco, these riders are ignored by public officials who fail to provide adequate bike paths, resented by drivers who feel entitlement to the roads by virtue of their car ownership, imitated by hipster poseurs who spend money on components they don't understand just to get 'the look', and otherwise completely unknown to countless more people around the world.

So with that in mind, when one sets out to make the definitive documentary on the subject... one which is set to tour festivals and introduce the world to fixed gear riding... I would have expected some narrative. But narrative never comes.

You think it's going to in the beginning. You see a messenger and he's talking about how he still has to deal with paper manifests instead of pagers for his schedule. And then with a killer music cue, he's off riding. What follows is an amazingly well edited collage of riding footage.

And what follows that is another amazingly well edited collage of riding footage with another guy.
And what follows that is another amazingly well edited collage of riding footage with another guy.
And what follows that is another amazingly well edited collage of riding footage with another guy.

And so on...

But I couldn't help but realize that if I didn't know what a fixed gear bike was, I wouldn't have any appreciation for what they were doing. They never say something introductory like "hey a fixed gear bike only has one gear and the pedals are hooked up in such a way that you can never stop pedaling... oh and we all ride with no brakes through traffic in one of the hilliest cities in the world." Imagine if you didn't get that... and you were watching those scenes where people are bombing down hills at an insane cadence... you wouldn't understand that they CAN'T STOP moving their legs... you wouldn't get that the skill is their ability to keep up with the bike as much as it is the bike's ability to keep up with them.

One simple declaration of that thesis would earn any non-enthusiast immediate respect and draw them in.

Plus I wanted to know (as a viewer of the film, not as someone who actually knows the answer) WHY fixed gear culture came to be synonymous with messenger culture. In the film, one older messenger mentions that when he started there was one guy on a fixed gear bike in SF. So what happened? How'd it take over?

His mention of this guy is one of about 5 spoken lines in the film. And it begs for explanation. Another one is a guy who shows his teeth and says he crashed. His teeth are all wired and messed up. Again, I'm dying to know more. And related to that, the credits are full of thank-yous that include names followed by (RIP). Are these fixed gear riders that didn't make it?

And I know fixed gear riding is a very macho domain but living in San Francisco I see my fair share of female riders but not a single one made it into the film. Not even in the background riding with some of the guys featured in the film.

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When I sat down to watch MASH, I was very excited. I thought the filmmakers had hit upon a gold-mine. They had set out to capture the story, much like the legendary Dog Town and Z Boys doc which tells of the formation of skate culture. But they actually had an even more amazing chance to document it in the moment... not in the nostalgic 20/20 hindsight style that makes Dogtown a safe bet. By that I mean that now we ALL know that kids skating in pools was a culture-shifting event. To tell that in a retrospective doc is obvious. But to have a chance to document a similar culture in-the-moment as its happening is an incredible chance.

And to be able to turn on thousands or millions of people to this culture is a filmmaker's dream.

But instead, MASH seemed to fall short as a really well done hour-long video of some guys in San Francisco who do bike tricks.

Again it's a really well done video for people who already fully understand the scene and just want to ooh and ahh at cool moves and close calls, but I was surprised that this movie - the definitive fixed gear story - is no story at all.