Movie: Secretariat (2010)

In a spout of “oh dear, it cost me 715 fricking Euros to have my car fixed today” (talk about OUCH!) and having spent 10+ hours at work plus also rushing around collecting said car and getting home late, I decided to take it easy tonight and settle in for what I expected to be pretty unsurprising movie watching, and poured myself a glass of rosé (it’s a lovely Syrah rosé, very mellow and laid back) and made one of the lactose free frozen pizzas the existence of which I recently discovered (it’s a perfectly average frozen pizza) and decided to put on Secretariat.

Now, the story is familiar, and its a Disney film about a horse, so there aren’t bound to be any surprises … and there weren’t, really. You get exactly what you expect to get. (Except for someone’s below average taste in music, alas.) The movie coasts along, nice and mellow, the drama is expectedly ever so slightly over the top, the camera work on the different races is quite interesting and sometimes innovative … and then along comes the music and totally kills the rest of the movie dead under about a ton of vocals and metaphorical icing, drowning out both the acting and the images (let alone the speech) by being too loud and really rather absolutely unfitting. I mean, what’s going on with the blaringly loud and strangely paced gospels? Is the horse Jesus, is that what you are saying? What’s going on? (That’s what the music in combination with the editing totally makes it look like). I’m sorry, but no. All that music does is jerk you right out of your mellow state of watchfulness into glaring WTF-is-this land, and kill all, all the tension you’re so laboriously building!

Also: the movie has no ending. It just stops at some point, but it does provide zero closure on anything besides the question of whether or not Secretariat will win the Belmont. The tension between numerous different human individuals builds and builds and then chop, climax, endtitles, and you sit there squarely dropped into whuh?-did-I-fall-asleep-for-two-minutes-?-land?  No conclusion, no closure, nothing. Very strange. Were they only allowed to make a two hour movie (it’s 118 minutes long) and ran out of time?

So, yeah, while I didn’t expect to love it madly and deeply, I also didn’t expect to mind it, but after watching it I kind of mind it more than I thought I would, unfortunately.