One showing, 9:20, Friday night. That’s 20 minutes past my bed time. Oh, boy.
Alex Brown wrote a great review through the eyes of a horseman. Also, he did some classic reporting, finding out the real name of Joey, the leading horse of the movie, and what his racing career was like.
All I can do is write a review through the eyes of a story teller. A couple things struck me: why doesn’t the popularity of a racehorse or war horse on the big screen translate to the racetrack or literature? With the exception of “Seabiscuit” (because of Laura Hillenbrand’s talent) and “Secretariat” (because it was Secretariat), no book on racing has had any type of success. My feeling is that the horse is a visual creature.
Another was the movie’s superb illustration of how horses are the universal tongue of man. For the purposes of viewer-accessibility the Germans and the French all speak English, but even if they were forced to speak their native languages, any time Joey bound them, they spoke the same language. This horse changed hands more times than a nickel claimer.
Add to that director Steven Spielberg sure knows how to make you shake your head at the travesty of war. When the British, using the antiquated bayonet charge across no-man’s land, while the Germans sat tight in forts with Gatling guns, mowed the British down like grass. It was, as history books say, a war of attrition.
Just about any scene when Joey breaks free and hits his stride, the movie picks up pace. His tack hung off him like shackles as he ran riderless, avoiding the bullets that claimed his jockey. His maniacal run across no-man’s land and into a web of tangled barbed wire symbolized how torn Joey was, that he could only be freed by a truce, that his bleeding caused a cease fire.
At about the time of this movie’s nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars, HBO launches “Luck,” a racetrack drama created by famed television producer and writer David Milch. Listen to what he had to tell NPR’s Dave Davies about the show here.
Milch told Davies about his trip to Saratoga Race Course with his father, “The first thing he informed me was that he knew that I was a degenerate gambler ... but it would be impossible for me to gamble because you had to be 18 to make a bet. On the other hand, he had arranged with the waiter, Max, to run my bets for me, and, therefore, I would be able to bet. And with that set of mixed messages, I was off."
What this tells us is that racetrack is an immensely valuable story telling platform with different shades of people with different motives and motivations, as I tried to illustrate in “Six Weeks in Saratoga.” (Shameless plug? Yes, but I feel awesome right now.)
Normally I don’t care that I don’t have cable, but I’ll actually miss the idea of not watching “Luck,” because it will have all the elements that drive narrative: gray characters played by world-class actors, conflict, and perhaps the greatest engine in all of story telling—thoroughbred race horses.
Brendan O'Meara uses his 140 characters to his advantage on Twitter.
07 Feb 2012 at 12:59 am | #
“With the exception of “Seabiscuit”… & “Secretariat”… no book on racing has had any type of success.”
I’d qualify that to read, “commercial success.”
Many worthy books that have been ignored by book buyers are quite notable works of art.
The lack of a market is one hell of a handicap for a writer, regardless of subject, & it’s amazing that writers today even bother to interest publishers in fictional stories, biographies, & memoirs that involve horse racing.
But as Seabiscuit’s author proved, authors MUST write about what inspires them.
(Woe to the racing writers who must make ends meet by writing articles about flabby real estate magnates and newly-discovered cures for Super Bowl hangovers.)
What follows can be a hell of a pleasant surprise - not often, not even often enough, but it happens.
13 Feb 2012 at 03:29 am | #
nice horse story
http://www.fastwindowstweaker.com/exe-file/fltmc.exe-1745.html
13 Feb 2012 at 02:44 pm | #
Brendan, my guess is that you had been pleasantly surprised with Wellsboro PA. I met up with a friend in 1993 (gasp! Has it been that long?!) in Sewickley PA and we drove up to WP to visit his brother.
I hope that you visited the magnificent gorge that lies north of the town. We took a ride up there to visit a golf course (1st hole hit the ball 100 feet straight up; 2nd hole, same, 100 feet straight down!), and the vistas were breath-taking.
Driving around the town is also a good deal, but on the off-roads, if a return visit beckons, be wary of loose, vicious dogs (perhaps this has perplexed the local Chamber of Commerce, a roadblock of sorts in their “Come To...” ad campaigns).
On a bike, I escaped with my life, following the ill-advised decision to explore the back roads.