Reviews

The History Channel jumped on the motor-head reality show bandwagon with this show, where two teams of two (friends/coworkers/family) get 10 hours to turn a pair of classic vehicles into drag-racers. The obligatory history content is fulfilled by adding a lot of background information on the vehicles.

The vehicles they're give are nearly identical (same model, engine, transmission), but the contestants have a selection of hot-rod parts to install to improve performance. If they go overtime, they get penalized 0.1s for every X minutes they go over, which I guess was added to the drag race elapsed times to determine the final score.

The team that wins the drag race gets to drive home both vehicles.

As this sort of show went, it wasn't as entertaining as most, but maybe more "family friendly". And it made a pleasant change from the History Channel's usual topic of war.

I was changing planes at Frankfurt airport, wandered into a music and video store, and the DVD cover caught my eye. When I got home and watched it (using a region-free DVD player), I was very glad I'd taken a chance on it.

If "Human Traffic", "Groove", "Go" and "Run Lola Run" are among your favourites, give "be.angeled" a spin. There's glorious scenes of the Love Parade with anthems like "For An Angel" and "der klang der familie", humour, drama, fantasy, and enough other stuff that it's a little hard to pigeonhole this movie.

A lot of the dialogue is in English, and the DVD has English subtitles (although some of them appear at the wrong time). It's unfortunate that this movie doesn't seem to have been promoted outside Germany.