Latest news with #BreakingAway
Time of India
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Thammudu box office collection day 6: Nithiin's Telugu action drama earns just Rs 35 lakh
Thammudu box office collection day 6: Thammudu, starring Nithiin, has failed to make an impact at the box office and is set to end up being a flop. The actioner hit the screens on July 4 and collected Rs 1.9 crore in India. It, however, failed to keep the momentum going and crashed on the weekdays. Thammudu continued its run on July 9. Thammudu nears the end of its run Nithiin's Thammudu failed to gain wide patronage on its sixth day. According to Sacnilk, a trade website, the action drama earned just Rs 35 lakh (nett) on Wednesday. This is 30% lower than the Rs 50 lakh it had earned on Tuesday (July 8). Thammudu had an overall occupancy of 10.82% on Wednesday.. The morning shows had an occupancy of 10.6%. The afternoon ones recorded an occupancy of 11.5%. The night shows, which usually record the highest footfalls on a day, disappointed on this front. Their occupancy was around 10.8% only. Thammudu recorded its best occupancy in Karimnagar (~43%). It, however failed to woo the audience in markets such as Nizamabad (3%) and Guntur (5%). Here is the day-wise breakdown for Thammudu Day 1: ₹ 1.9 cr Day 2: ₹ 1.16 cr Day 3: ₹ 1.28 cr Day 4: ₹ 0.67 cr Day 5: ₹ 0.5 cr Day 6: 0.35 cr Its total collection stands at Rs 5.7 crore The word-of-mouth is unimpressive Thammudu has failed to impress most critics and the consensus is that it is letdown by the screenplay, The Times of India stated that it was 'weighed down by overblown melodrama'. 'Thammudu had all the ingredients for a stirring emotional-action drama, but in trying too hard to be everything, it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. A film that had the potential to hit the bullseye sadly misses the mark,' read a portion of the review. The dull word-of-mouth has played a bi role in diluting the buzz around Thammudu. This, in turn, spelled trouble for the flick once the initial curiosity faded. Is Thammudu a remake of Pawan Kalyan's film? Thammudu is not a remake of or a sequel to Pawan Kalyan's 1999 classic of the same name. The 1970s film, which was inspired by the English-language film Breaking Away, centred on the journey of a well-known family's youngest son. Nithiin's Thammudu, on the other hand, revolves around the shocking events that unfold in a fictional village over a night. It features Sapthami Gowda as the leading lady opposite Nithiin is directed by Sriram Venu.
USA Today
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Remember Greg LeMond? Tour de France legend to reap Congress's highest civilian honor.
Maybe you've heard of Greg LeMond. Maybe you haven't. And if his name doesn't ring familiar, maybe it should. LeMond, 64, was the first American cyclist to win the Tour de France, one of the two or three most-watched sporting events in the world. And with the doping-era disqualifications of Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, LeMond is the only American who has won the Tour. On July 9, LeMond will visit the Capitol to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow, on par with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Congress approved the medal in 2020, but the pandemic forced a delay in awarding it. Since 1776, Congress has awarded only a few Gold Medals to athletes. Honorees include boxer Joe Louis, tennis giant Billie Jean King, Olympian Jesse Owens and golfer Jack Nicklaus. Why is Congress giving Greg LeMond a medal? In the United States, cycling is mostly recreational. In Europe and much of the rest of the world, it is a major competitive sport, and LeMond is one of its legends. LeMond was a once-in-a-generation talent. Born in California in 1961, he entered competitive cycling in the 1970s amid a modest American cycling boom, an era lovingly captured in the classic 1979 film 'Breaking Away.' In a sense, Greg LeMond's story is a real-life 'Breaking Away.' In the underground competitive cycling scene of his era, LeMond was so much better than everyone else that officials let him race against older boys. He beat them anyway. LeMond decamped to Europe in 1980 and soon proved himself the most talented young rider on that continent, against much stiffer competition. The rest of LeMond's career unfolded with the sort of high drama you mostly see in movies. (In fact, actor Ben Stiller is said to be making a movie about LeMond's 1986 Tour victory.) In the summer of '86, LeMond captivated the cycling world by claiming America's first Tour win, an epic duel against another all-time great, Frenchman Bernard Hinault. All of France seemed set on denying LeMond his victory: Fans, journalists, fellow cyclists and even LeMond's own teammates, not to mention Hinault himself. Not for nothing did Hinault earn the nickname 'The Badger.' The late Richard Moore, a Scottish writer, recounted the 1986 Tour in a classic cycling book, 'Slaying the Badger.' LeMond staged one of sport's greatest comebacks LeMond should have gone on to win the Tour in 1987 and 1988: He was that much better than the rest of the peloton. But in April 1987, a few months before the next Tour, LeMond nearly died. He was turkey-hunting on a family ranch in rural California. A relative shot him by accident, piercing his body with dozens of shotgun pellets. By the time a helicopter delivered him to a hospital, LeMond had almost bled out. After the accident, LeMond could barely walk, let alone pedal. And yet, over the next two years, he staged a spectacular comeback. He entered races he could not finish, then finished races he could not win. By the summer of 1989, LeMond had regained his form. He entered the Tour that year and quickly proved he was capable of winning it again. The 1989 Tour pitted LeMond against another Frenchman: Laurent Fignon, a two-time Tour winner who was gunning for his third victory. The 1986 edition of cycling's premier event had been a great Tour. The 1989 edition would be widely remembered as the greatest Tour of all time. The Tour de France plays out over 21 days of racing and covers more than 2,000 miles. Each cyclist's time is recorded at the end of every stage. The rider with the shortest overall time at the end wins the race. By the finish, the victor often commands a lead of five or 10 minutes. And that's why the 1989 Tour captivated the world: It was really, really close. After the second stage of racing, LeMond led Fignon by 51 seconds in cumulative time. After Stage 5, Fignon led by five seconds. After Stage 10, LeMond led by seven seconds. And so on. By the final day of racing, July 23, 1989, Fignon held a 50-second lead over LeMond. The last stage was an individual time trial: A race against the clock, each cyclist going all out for 15 miles, riding alone into Paris as the stopwatch ticked. The course was short and flat, and almost no one thought LeMond had a chance of riding it 50 seconds faster than Fignon to claim victory on the Champs-Élysées. The final moments of that time trial delivered some of the most exhilarating live sports ever broadcast. Both Fignon and LeMond rode the race of their lives, but LeMond rode faster. At the finish, he had beaten Fignon by a margin of eight seconds. In more than a century of racing, the 1989 Tour remains the closest ever. LeMond had staged one of the greatest comebacks in the history of American sports. 'The True King of American Cycling' Many years later, I wrote a biography of LeMond, with the 1989 Tour as its centerpiece. It published in 2018 as 'The Comeback: Greg LeMond, the True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France.' I hoped LeMond might one day become as well-known as Lance Armstrong, the Texan cyclist who won a record seven Tours between 1999 and 2005. Armstrong was perhaps the most celebrated athlete in America until a doping investigation brought him down. Shortly after my book came out, I received an email from U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, a Democrat from California, LeMond's birthplace. Thompson was a cyclist. He had read my book, and he wanted to honor LeMond. Some months later, Thompson introduced legislation to award LeMond the Congressional Gold Medal. It was an uphill battle, but Thompson collected the necessary support: a supermajority, two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate. On December 4, 2020, President Donald Trump signed the Greg LeMond Congressional Gold Medal Act into law. 'More than any other cyclist in our history,' Thompson said on the House floor, 'Greg LeMond was the epitome of the 'Breaking Away' culture: A young kid on a bike, trying to do things no American had ever done.'
Indian Express
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
‘Aamir Khan said throw them out': Mansoor Khan recalls firing Milind Soman from Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, says original cast made life ‘miserable'
Often described as an unofficial remake of the 1979 American coming-of-age classic Breaking Away, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar has long been associated with its supposed Western inspiration. But director Mansoor Khan, in an exclusive conversation with SCREEN, reveals that the roots of the film are far more personal. 'The film is actually semi-autobiographical,' Khan shares. 'A lot of Aamir Khan's character, Sanju, was actually derived from my own life.' Recalling his early years, Khan says, 'I dropped out of MIT and came back from the US, and when I came back, I was a lost soul. And basically, I was feeling this guilt, that I had wasted so much of my parents' money. And now I was acting like an angry young kid who's angry with the whole world, but actually, he should be angry with himself.' Before Jo Jeeta, Khan channeled these feelings into a video film. 'So, I made a video film, actually, about a guy who just wants to laze around. It was a full one-hour-forty-minute film with two songs and background music. The first film to be made on video, I'm talking about 1982.' The film, titled Umberto, ended on a rather unconventional note. 'It was a tragic ending, because the guy is so useless that by the time he straightens up, the girl he likes. and who loves him, he loses her to his arch rival, Umberto. And he's the guy who works, earns, and is the responsible son and all that. And these two guys live one above the other. And the guy was called Amole. In the film, Amole himself played the character, Amol Gupte. And the Amole character was exactly like me. So basically, that was the premise. And then later that premise evolved into Jo Jeeta. See, Jo Jeeta is not a cycling film, say like Breaking Away. The idea was not to have a cycle race or any kind of race. Jo Jeeta, for me, is an awakening film.' While speaking about Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, Khan also admits the film came dangerously close to collapse, largely due to his own casting misjudgments. He reveals that nearly 60–70% of the film had to be reshot after early choices in the cast proved disastrous. 'I cast a bunch of people, and it was my mistake. It was the wrong cast,' Khan admits. 'I actually feel I should write a book on Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar. That's the one film where everything felt like fate, a true child of destiny. So many amazing things happened. Strangely, everyone who initially came into the project, for one reason or another, I rejected the right ones and picked the wrong ones.' Those decisions soon took a toll on the production. 'We shot for 40–45 days in and around Ooty, Coonoor, then came back to Bombay and shot a lot more, including the songs. But I could see the film was going nowhere,' he recalls. 'I won't take names, but those people were absolutely unprofessional. They made life miserable, not just for me, but for the entire crew. The film was turning out really badly, and it also nearly stalled.' At his lowest point, Khan even considered abandoning the project. 'I felt like giving up. But the film's story is about getting up and winning. So in a way, life was mirroring art,' he says. 'We stayed quiet. We threw those guys out. They went to the press, said all kinds of nasty things about me and Aamir. But we didn't respond. Our focus was clear, we had a film to make, and a good one. And in the end, the result is in front of you.' Also Read | Aamir Khan was the 'bad guy' of Jo Jeeta Wahi Sikandar who won, Deepak Tijori's character was better: director Mansoor Khan Ironically, many of the people he let go tried to return once the tide turned. 'Some of those same people came back to me later, including Milind Soman,' Khan reveals. 'They didn't understand filmmaking. They didn't understand humility, or the director's role, or that the film is bigger than any individual, bigger than the actor, the director, or the producer. They came in with strange ideas. But again, the mistake was mine. I shouldn't have cast them.' The turning point came when Milind Soman exited and Deepak Tijori stepped in. 'Why I call it a child of destiny is because Milind went out, and Deepak came in. Deepak had actually tested with Milind. But Milind got the part, based on his looks and physique. I wasn't making casting decisions properly back then,' Khan confesses. What ultimately saved the film, Khan says, was the support of Aamir Khan. 'The person who pulled me out of it was Aamir. He said, 'Throw these guys out. We'll make a good film.' I was in a really dark place then, depressed, on the verge of a breakdown. I used to wake up in the middle of the night crying during the shoot.' Despite the ordeal, Khan says he holds no grudges. 'I don't dwell on it. I just say: Fine. You did what you did. You lost a good film. You lost credibility. You didn't respect me, or the film, and that always comes back around.'
Chicago Tribune
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: How ‘Breaking Away' helped a newbie cyclist conquer his inner critic
The right sports movie can really do a number on you. It can maneuver around cliches, resistance points and aversions to string-pulling to win the big race against your more skeptical instincts. The right sports movie, even if it's not great, has wily ways of inspiring us to do something, try something, go somewhere we haven't yet. It can bend us, at least a little, into a new, in-progress variation of the person we were the last time we checked. But it's usually not immediate. Movies tend to roll around in your head, half-remembered, for decades. And then it's there again, when you need it. Last weekend, for example. Last weekend, the 1979 charmer 'Breaking Away,' nominally about cycling but about much more, glided out of the mists of time to push me up another series of hills on the second day of a three-day, two-night bike-packing trip out of Lower Manhattan, up through the Bronx, past Yonkers, into rural New York State and then into a lovely bit of Connecticut. And back again. Movie first, personal experience later. Forty-six summers ago, 'Breaking Away' came out in theaters. It started slowly, not a hit, but it built an audience week by week and became one. Such things were possible then. Director Peter Yates, best known as an action director ('Bullitt'), wasn't a likely choice for the material but he turned out to be good for it. The screenplay by playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich won the Oscar; it dealt with four recent working-class high school graduates living in Bloomington, Indiana, in the shadow of Indiana University and in a state of uncertainty regarding their own futures. Tesich basically combined two of his unfilmed scripts set in Bloomington and came up with 'Bambino,' retitled 'Breaking Away.' Dennis Christopher, beautifully cast and, on a recent rewatch, even better than I remembered, played Dave Stohler, the cycling enthusiast besotted with all things Italian, from grand opera to scraps of handbook Italian phrases. ('Buongiorno!' he calls out to a perplexed neighbor as he rides by.) His doleful father, portrayed by Paul Dooley in a magically right match of performer and material, despairs for his blithely romantic son's future. Barbara Barrie, nominated for an Academy Award, plays Dave's fond, supportive mother. Dave and his friends spend their summer days hanging out at the limestone quarry, ragging on each other, cliff-jumping into the water, wondering what sort of lives await them. The big race in 'Breaking Away' happens when the Italian cyclists sponsored by Cinzano agree to come to Indianapolis to compete. This race gives Dave the setback his story requires, prior to the climactic 'Little 500' race back in Bloomington. Dave and his cohorts, the 'cutters,' aka the townies in a town built on working-class stone cutters' labor, square off on wheels against the privileged IU fraternity racers. Is the movie a classic? Friends, that is so very much up to you. Few things in life are touchier or more prone to argument than the topic of favorite sports movies. What I liked about 'Breaking Away,' back when I was a year out of college, and again on a rewatch the other day, had everything to do with a very simple matter, described aptly by one sub-Reddit poster as 'the simple joy of riding a bike.' The poster added: 'But if that doesn't sound interesting, it isn't worth a watch.' To which another Reddit poster countered: 'Well, I have zero interest in bike riding and I loved this movie.' 'Breaking Away' keeps its tensions between townies and university students relatively uncomplicated, but as Christopher told PBS NewsHour in 2019, 'There this lesson in it about class struggle, and you never see stories like that anymore. There's a story about how the father and mother grow closer together through this eccentric child. And there's a story about how all the male characters are examples of male doubt at this particular time in their lives.' Last weekend I joined a dear friend on her second bike-packing trip with the terrific Brooklyn, New York outfit 718 Outdoors, run by a former architect and bike shop proprietor Joe Nocella. My friend is a lifelong jock ('and so much more!' she states, for the record) and I am not. I learned a few things on the trip. I learned that 'training' for even a modest 130-mile excursion, which in my case meant not training enough, will probably work better if I train without the quotation marks. I learned that bike-packing, which means carrying a lot of stuff in pannier bags on your bike, takes some effort. Some of that is mental. I learned that various forms of adversity on the first, 58-mile day provoked an interior debate conducted by my inner pessimist (), my inner realist () and my inner stoic optimist (). I overpacked by 30-40%. On day one, I scraped the side of a stone pathway marker hard enough yet slowly enough to detach, in a permanent way, one of the pannier's buckles. Also, I treated the bottom hook attachment as an unnecessary backup, which was the wishful thinking of a newbie. But I learned this, too, so very gratefully: Our tour group of 20 or so, of all ages, from all over the globe by ancestry and all over New York City by residency, plus me, from Chicago, met every challenge in their individual ways. A typical number of flat tires; some wonky rack problems; hills too much for some of us, leading to pushing the bikes up the rest of the way on foot. These things happen, and they happened. On day three I had some of the finest medically untrained minds in the country performing emergency surgery on my broken spoke. They got me going again, and back to New York City. And, separately, the riders who teamed up to MacGyver my busted pannier with a complex and delicate array of straps, bungee cords and inner tubes came up with a group art installation worthy of serious critical praise. 'A thing of ugly beauty' One of my former (and best) Tribune editors, Kevin Williams, now lives in Porto, Portugal, where he allegedly takes it easier than he used to in Chicago in terms of his maniacal yet stylish devotion to high-intensity cycling. I asked him if cycling held any life lessons for him, and how riding on two wheels might have informed other parts of his life. His reply, in part: 'The weight room, the place I used to make my cycling better, had different lessons, or more like a notion. Which essentially was, 'After you do this, nothing else you do today will be as hard.'' The bike-packing last weekend was hard, and great, and the communal cookout around the fire on night two went on for several wonderful hours, just before the frogs near the campsite in Connecticut started croaking. Stray images from 'Breaking Away' rode with me the whole time. As the miles piled up, I resembled a young Daniel Stern, a little too big and a lotta too gangly for his own bike. But at the end of it all, I felt like Dennis Christopher, hoisting his team's trophy at the end of the movie.
Chicago Tribune
09-05-2025
- Sport
- Chicago Tribune
Naperville's Will Wagner rides to victory in Little 500, the country's largest collegiate bike race: ‘The most surreal feeling ever'
Growing up in Naperville, Will Wagner didn't cycle. Hockey and lacrosse were his sports of choice in high school. Now, the 22-year-old is a two-time winner of the largest collegiate bike race in the country. Late last month, Wagner rode to victory in the Little 500, an annual cycling race held at Indiana University's Bill Armstrong Stadium in Bloomington. Modeled after the famed Indianapolis 500, the race was made widely popular by the 1979 film 'Breaking Away,' starring Dennis Quaid and Dennis Christopher. And oh did Wagner break away to triumph. 'We lapped the whole field,' Wagner said, speaking by phone Thursday. Wagner, who was set to graduate from Indiana University with a bachelor's degree in information systems and business analytics Saturday, competed on a team with three other cyclists. The Little 500, which attracts thousands of fans each year, is composed of a women's race and a men's race. The women's race is 100 laps (25 miles). The men's is 200 laps (50 miles). Riders compete in teams of four, with the fields — for both men and women — totaling 33 teams. The race is essentially a relay, with riders switching off who's on the track. Wagner anchored for his team — the Black Key Bulls — so it was up to him to finish the race. The moment he did was 'the most surreal feeling ever,' Wagner said. 'I don't know, it leaves you speechless every time I think about it,' he said. Wagner was born and raised in Naperville, he said. He attended Benet Academy High School in Lisle. Before college, Wagner didn't race. His dad did — albeit 'a long time ago,' he said — while his mom ran marathons. When he set off to Indiana University, his dad wanted him to check out the Little 500, Wagner said. Within the first few months on campus, he attended a meeting about becoming involved. He hasn't looked back since. There are three kinds of teams that compete in the Little 500, those fielded by fraternity and sorority organizations, residence halls and independent groups, Wagner said. The Black Key Bulls fall into the third category. Joining was 'definitely a grind,' Wagner said. 'I had no previous cycling experience and just right off the bat, I got put into some pretty intense training weeks. … I'd say, on average, I'd spend 12 to 13 hours a week (training), whether that's riding and lifting on top of that.' About a month before the big race, aspiring teams vie for a spot in the field through qualifications, according to Peter Schulz, Little 500 race director. Teams get three attempts to qualify. This year, 38 teams attempted to qualify in the men's race and a record 36 teams for the women's race, Schulz said. Wagner's sophomore year, the Black Key Bulls didn't qualify. 'We had a really strong team, probably projected to be one of the favorites in the race,' he said. '(But) during qualifications, we kind of messed up' and didn't make the cut. As he went into his junior year, Wagner was the only returning rider of the group that didn't qualify, he said. 'That put me in a position where I was automatically a leader,' he said. He and the new Black Key Bulls members came in with a new fire and ultimately pulled off the kind of comeback that's the stuff of dreams, returning to win it all last year, he said. Then they went and made it a two-peat with this year's victory. 'I think that struggle definitely made us stronger,' Wagner said. As he looked ahead to graduation, Wagner said joining the Black Key Bulls his freshman year 'was probably the best life decision I ever made.' 'I think even just joining has not only helped me become a better cyclist but a better person,' he said. The Little 500's tenure has stretched on for more than 70 years. It was founded in 1951 by Howdy Wilcox Jr., then president of the Illinois University Foundation, as a means of raising money for student scholarships, according to Schulz. Wilcox was inspired by his father, who had been an Indy 500 driver. The Little 500 started out as just a men's race. The women's race followed 37 years later in 1988. Since its inception, the Little 500 has contributed more than $2.5 million to student scholarships and causes, according to a race news release. For the past two years, funds raised through races have gone towards supporting mental health on Indiana University's Bloomington campus. Schulz, a graduate of Indiana University and former Little 500 rider himself, said this year's race was 'phenomenal.' 'There are few things guaranteed in life — death, taxes and an electric atmosphere at Bill Armstrong Stadium, of course,' Schulz quipped. After graduation, Wagner is moving to Chicago for a job as a business analyst. He's 'pumped' to be closer to Naperville, where his family still resides, he said. Post-college, Wagner said he hopes to continue cycling. Maybe even get into running. 'I think I just have a hard time sitting still,' he said.
