Well, the racing sequences in Seabiscuit are definitely the best ever filmed, and… uh… the horses look pretty. Aside from that, it’s a waste of celluloid. It plays like the horrible spawn of a syrupy Movie of the Week and one of the more tedious Ken Burns PBS specials. It shares at least one flaw with the summer blockbusters: It never, ever requires you to work anything out for yourself.
It really does pain me to trash this movie (not half as much as it pained me to sit through it) because I get a lump in my throat whenever I watch a horse race. Not only would I love to see the horse-racing world depicted vibrantly and intelligently on-screen, but thoroughbred racing could stand to win a few more fans. Then again, its lack of subtlety shouldn’t disqualify Seabiscuit from box-office success; quite the opposite, in fact.
I had a bad feeling as soon as the movie opened with a sequence of still photos from the early 20th century and maudlin, interminable, inconsequential backstory for the three main human characters (Seabiscuit's past gets about one line of expository dialogue). The narration, by Ken Burns narrator David McCullough, is wretched, earnestly spewing twaddle like, “The country needed someone to save it, and maybe that someone was a horse.” The only worse lines go to poor Jeff Bridges (anyone else remember when you used to be able to tell him apart from his brother Beau?), who gets to say ponderous things like, “Everyone deserves a second chance.”
In a switch from his usual place in the scheme of things, William H. Macy is the single worst thing about this movie. In a role invented for the film, he’s as intensely obnoxious as I’ve seen a human being be, and I learned quickly to cringe whenever he appeared. The rest of the cast is blandly competent; for a minute or two, you think Chris Cooper might salvage his role with silent dignity, but then his dialogue turns into, essentially, a series of deadpan one-liners. Tobey Maguire – sorry, kid, you starved yourself for nothing. And could the close-ups of him “riding” look more fake? By contrast, real-life jockey Gary Stevens seems promising as an actor, as long as he gets to play jockeys. And I have to throw in this line because Stephen liked it so much: Elizabeth Burns, who plays Bridges’ wife, has teeth bigger than Seabiscuit’s. The horse himself is bereft of personality (or equinality), not surprising since he was played by ten different horses. No wonder he’s dark bay in one scene and chestnut in another.
Here’s how bad the movie was: It reminded Stephen of The Legend of Bagger Vance. So do yourself a favor and just read the book, or watch one of the various specials on PBS or the Discovery Channel or whatever that shows the real Seabiscuit. (David Edelstein in his excellent review in Slate notes that, in the first filmed version of Seabiscuit’s life, The Story of Seabiscuit, starring a teen-aged Shirley Temple, a son of Seabiscuit played him, but he was so slow that they ended up using the actual newsreel footage of the famous match race with War Admiral. So I watched parts of the movie when they showed it this week on TCM, and it’s incredibly inept: the movie is in color, but the race footage is black and white, so they just made all the scenes at the racetrack in black and white!)
And, yes, I went to see Urinetown, which is not only an apt description of the neighborhood through which I had to walk to get from the BART station to my hotel (on the edge of the Tenderloin), but also a very funny musical that spoofs Broadway-musical conventions much like South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut did. I wouldn’t recommend paying more than about $20 for it, which is what I paid, but it’s fun. BART, incidentally, makes the DC Metro look efficient: its ticket machines don’t give any change, and half of them were broken at any given stop.
I
spent my free day wandering around the city, discovering some cool
little
shops around 9th
and Irving, walking along Ocean Beach (which was littered with sand
dollars and these odd jellyfish that were a brilliant cobalt blue with
a sort of clear ridge along the top; I later found out they're actually
floating polyps with the mellifluous scientific name Velella
velella and the charming common name By-the-Wind
Sailor). I visited the McSweeneys’
crew’s pirate-supply
store and purchased an eye patch for Tiffany. I did not get mopped.
And Karl had
just
died. Nevertheless, I, too, would rank it among the top five
pirate-supply
stores I’ve been to. Next door to it is a gardening/taxidermy
supply
store, so these two shops may be the only place in America where you
can
comparison-shop for glass eyeballs side-by-side (they’re cheaper at the
taxidermy place). This shop also sold penis bones of several
small
mammals, including red fox, mink, raccoon, and coyote. I don't
know why you would need a mink penis bone. Just up the
street from these stores is one that rents and sells props and looks
like
the coolest thrift store ever. It had no less than three velvet
Elvises
(all late-period, jumpsuited Elvis) and one non-velvet Elvis.
Also
on Valencia
Street, I was accosted by a guy who looked like Joe Walsh on a bad
day, dressed in a zebra-striped suit, who asked me genially, “Would you
like me to adjust your attitude with a kiss?” Would you like me
to
adjust your balls with my knee?
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