Scanialara
You won't be disappointed!
PodBill
Just what I expected
Pacionsbo
Absolutely Fantastic
juneebuggy
A nice feel-good family film along the lines of Seabiscuit but without any of the drama. The cast is fantastic and a great setting in the late 1960's. I just keep wanting to say nice, I mean nothing awful happens to anyone here except for a tooth abscess and a bit of sexism but I still found it interesting. Tracing the origins of the "greatest race horse too ever live" from inception through his triple crown win.There's actually not much attention paid to "Big Red" it mostly follows his owner 'Penny' (played brilliantly by Diane lane) a housewife who inherits her ailing fathers stables and her struggles in a male dominated sport, juggling a career and family.The attention to the issues of the time is well done. I can't find any faults, a definite feel good movie the whole family can enjoy. 03/09/14
gretz-569-323863
I gave "Secretariat" 8 stars instead of the 7 it probably deserved because it's one of those movies I watch every time it's on cable. For whatever reason, it is ridiculously entertaining, as long as you don't mind a little cornpone "Disney-fication" here and there.John Malkovich is wonderful as always, playing it very broadly, and sporting a dreadful "French-Canadian" accent, but it's a fun role and he has fun with it. And pretty soon they're going to be talking about "the ageless Diane Lane." She's approaching 60 and she looks just amazing. It must have been difficult for her to play someone who was not only a real person, but was also there on the set, watching her. No pressure there, eh? This is definitely not a study of the "soft underbelly" of horse racing. In "Secretariat," the stables are always shown in sunset and soft focus, the grooms and the secretaries are always full of homespun wisdom, and everything turns out OK in the end. And the Tweedys are one of those picture-perfect families you can't help but envy. "How can I raise a couple million dollars to keep my racehorse?" is a problem I'd like to have.But put all that stuff aside. You will love this movie for the racing scenes! The "horse cam" angle is really interesting, especially when you read about the process the filmmakers had to go through to get those shots. (There are other horsey little pleasures too, like the scene where the colt is born.) However, I echo some of the other reviewers in wishing that the filmmakers had used more of the real races. (They only showed the actual tape of one race; all the others were re-creations.) I get that they wanted to be poetic, but there was nothing more poetic than the real Secretariat.I remember watching that Belmont race on TV with a group of friends. And that moment when Secretariat pulled away, you could almost see the horse thinking "OK, let's do it"--and he just took off. It was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen. This movie does a nice job of letting us share that excitement again.
rwestjr606
As someone who lived right in the middle of the whole Secretariat story, I have to say that the real life events were much more glorious than the movie. Secretariat was a larger than life animal, a Pegasus in the flesh. I have to agree with Ben Lapke's review that the movie was about Mrs. Chenery (then Mrs Tweedy) and as someone who knows and respects her for the lady that she is, if she liked the movie then that's good enough for me. Its certainly not the movie that all of us in the racing and breeding business hoped would be made about this greatest horse of the second half of the 20th Century but I think that's more due to the movie's budget. I'm sorry but you just can't substitute the backstretch of bush track Evangeline Downs for Belmont Park. The broken down barns and rusted out pick-up trucks visible while the Belmont was being run down the backstretch in the movie were embarrassing for all of us who watched that most astounding of performances in the third leg of the Triple Crown. For horse lovers, this was something akin to a religious experience; for a horse to win the first Triple Crown in 25 years by 31 lengths and lower the track record by 2 seconds (setting a new World Record in the process) was amazing. I just hope that at some point in the future, the REAL story of Secretariat will be told.
writers_reign
This is the kind of film where expectation triumphs over knowledge. No serious theatre buff goes to see Othello or Julius Caesar and is devastated when Desdemona gets it where the chicken got the axe or Caesar's buddies plunge their daggers where they'll do the most good. We KNOW how it ends but we HOPE that a new production will still entertain us. So it is here, even non-sports fans have probably heard the name Secretariat and are vaguely aware he established some kind of record in horse-racing circles and that, coupled with the name Disney, is sufficient to get us to the box office. We are not - or should not be - disappointed. This is an uplifting tale involving a woman and a horse and it's all true - well, maybe ninety per cent true. It's full of Disney values, well acted by Diane Lane, John Malkovich and Margo Martingale and if it doesn't quite eclipse the other movies by the same thirty-one lengths by which Secretariat blew his rivals away in the Belmont Stakes - the third leg of the 'Triple Crown', we are still left with a feel-good movie for all the family.
