This great movie can easily be dismissed as a cheap romance flick, but it actually
is very good. The bull fight scenes are amazing and definitely not CGI,
Scott Eastwood (son of Clint Eastwood) and Britt Robertson are both great and the chemistry
works. The story frames an other love story,
playing around WW 2 which is even better. It contains some references to Math,
because Ruth, the women in the inside story also taught math and learned art,
at the legendary Black mountain college, which for mathematicians is exciting because of Buckminster
Fuller or Max Dehn (a student of Hilbert).
The unusual and creative teaching experience at this place had been a reason for many giants
of art and music or architecture to emerge there.
(These times have of course long gone, as modern
universities have become profit driven factories, administered by business people,
trimmed for efficiency).
It is easy to pre-judge the movie as ``kitsch", especially after
the first few scenes (bull fighting, sorority house life introducing the main protagonists),
but there are some good questions which emerge:
why would somebody live and practice years to ride 8 seconds on a
furious bull; or why would somebody pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for
a Jackson Pollock painting? Both can be dismissed easily as ``bullshit" (a comparison
which literally comes up as a joke during the movie). The ``longest ride" not
only stands for the 8 second rides on the bull, but for life itself, which can be
rough and short and throw you off the bull early and there is a lottery which pairs you
with a specific bull. Great movie. For me, about one of 10 movies
I watch belong the class that I really want to see again. This is one of them (and I already
saw it twice).