Handlebars: Two Wheels and a Lot of Nonsense

Is this thing worth your lunch break?

If you like old-timey instructional shorts that have no business being this energetic, you will probably dig Handlebars. It is for people who enjoy looking at vintage junk and hearing a narrator try to make early engineering sound like a slapstick comedy routine. If you want a serious, academic look at transportation, stay away. This is pure, unadulterated archival chaos.

Honestly, watching this felt like finding a dusty reel in a basement that someone clearly left on the projector by accident. The movie just dives straight into 1819 without any preamble. One second you are sitting there, the next you are watching a guy essentially straddle a piece of wood and scoot along the ground with his feet. It is hilarious. I am not sure if it was meant to be funny, but the way these people struggle with their primitive machines is a delight.

The pacing is all over the place. At one point, the narrator is really digging into the structural integrity of the frame, and then it cuts to a guy falling off his bike in a way that looks painfully real. It reminded me a bit of the frantic energy in Loose Lions, where things just happen because the film says so. You get no time to breathe, just more bicycles.

There is this one specific sequence where the narrator talks about safety, and the footage shows a man wearing a hat that looks like it weighs ten pounds. He hits a bump, the hat goes one way, he goes the other. The film just keeps rolling like nothing happened. Nobody stops to check on him. It is brutal.

It is definitely not as gritty as The Steel Trail, obviously. This is much lighter, though it has that same feeling of being made in an era where everyone was just happy to have a camera pointing at something moving. The music is this jaunty piano thing that repeats until you start to feel like you are losing your mind. It works, though.

• The narrator sounds like he is reading the script while holding his breath.
• The transition between the wooden bikes and the high-wheelers is shockingly abrupt.
• I still have no idea why the music gets louder during the crash scenes.
• Watching men in suits ride bikes is basically the height of comedy.

It is not a masterpiece. It is just a weird, perfectly strange slice of history. If you have ten minutes to kill and want to see how we got from walking with a piece of wood between our legs to the modern bike, this is your ticket. Just do not expect any profound revelations about the human condition. It is just bicycles. Really, really old ones.