Rating: 
Summary: Promoting Thoroughbred Racing
Review: If you've got as far as MY review, thanks. I must tell you that although the style and cinematography (as we called it in the old days) of this film is strongly reminiscent of the assembly-line films of the 1940's-50's, that is also its great strength. It is one of the few modern movies that can literally appeal to everyone. (I generally hate to use that catchphrase,because to me it smacks of mediocrity,and this movie has its share...) but in this case I apply it because it has an enduring theme. Everyone can find something to like in the Horatio-Alger-like (or maybe, for today's younger citizens, Schwarzenegger-like...?) tale of people who wound up in the public eye because they were found by the right people, at the right time, and in the right place. In the 'Biscuit's case, he ran his tail off for some time before he was "found". I saw the movie first and then read Hillenbrand's really beautifully written book, and as a result, renewed my interest in horses (what little girl didn't love horses?) and our local historic track, Bay Meadows. As a result I am becoming involved in saving a track in the middle of the most computer-driven community in the country. The town council, San Mateo, seems to want to sever all ties to the very earthy world of horse-racing. Bay Meadows belongs to the WORLD. Ok, Amazon will likely delete my comments, but if they don't, PLEASE look at Bay Meadows website (a logical guess at the address) and check the history...if you love Seabiscuit, help preserve a famous track he ran on. Ok, off my high horse. Bottom line---EXCELLENT MOVIE.
Rating: 
Summary: It coulda been a contender.
Review: I think a lot of people--grown-up people, anyway--really want to like this film for what it aspires to be. And it's a movie that had a lot of potential--good actors, good characters, good concept, good sets, good cinematography, and a not too bad horse. There's lots of really good stuff. But having a lot of really good stuff doesn't necessarily make a really good movie, and Seabiscuit is Exhibit A. A lot of people have commended this movie for its unhurried leisurely pace. I say nonsense. This movie is just plain slow, and it's slow because someone wasn't willing to make the cuts necessary to tighten it up. Good story telling requires discipline, and that's where this film falls short. What's left is a potentially great film that falters at the gate. Definitely one to rent first.
Rating: 
Summary: Well.....
Review: 1 star for the movie itself.....no big deal. An extra star and a half for Tobey Maguire - he's awesome!! ½ star, because a Hollywood-movie dared to show the death of a child and smoking people!! (It's still MUCH too nice and MUCH too politically correct.) That's three.....actually a full star more than it really deserves, but what the heck.
Rating: 
Summary: Animal Cruelty Again Celebrated
Review: I'm not one of those wacko animal activists, but I do love animals and have lived on a race horse training facilty. Therefore I know of what I speak. The Hollywood gang lives in a sanitized society and never see what REALLY happens in the REAL world. They go to the track, see the pretty horses come out and race, then leave the track. They never see what goes on behind the scenes: the horses that have started racing training as yearlings and whose delicate legs and feet break down before they reach full adulthood. Horses thrown away to slaughter, or worse, sold to Mexican tracks where the last ounce is run out of them and then most likely to the Bull Rings for the last insult. Maybe some of you remember 20 years ago when Timely Writer broke down on the track on national TV, his foreleg shattering and snapping OFF at the knee. You could see the leg, hanging by a thread of skin, spinning in the air. This happens all the time. There is no way to save these horses. Approx. 80% never stay sound through training to even get to the first race. Even more do not stay sound. To retire from racing is an exception, not a rule. I saw this movie (free as I ditched another movie to watch this one)and it wasn't that well done. If you MUST see a racing movie, the best one ever made was the Austrailian "Phar Lap" from 1984. However, this horse was too good and they loaded him down with about 100 pounds of weights to slow him down. In the end, they believe he was murdered. Great end for such a trusting, helpful species as the horse! It's just too bad that director Ross and his relation, Spielberg don't spend their millions developing rescue havens for the miserable "also-rans" instead of buying more racehorses If you truly love horses, do NOT support this so-called "sport." Maybe the great day will come when the Racehorse (along with racing Greyhounds) becomes an endangered species. Even better: Extinct!!
Rating: 
Summary: One of the greats - The best racing film ever
Review: This is the true story of one of the greatest horses to run on American tracks. The movie includes short overviews of society at the time. The effects of the Great Depression were one of the reasons that the crowds fell in love with this underdog. The acting was great and the racing scenes are far superior to the normal car chase scenes in most action films. I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: The Little Horse that Could
Review: The term "feel-good movie" is, like "popcorn flick" and "chick flick," one of those sweeping and usually inaccurate generalizations that are used to color any number of superficially similar films. If the definition is stretched broadly enough, "feel-good" can be used to describe anything from Chariots of Fire to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. In the summer of 2003, however, there were two movies for which "feel-good" was both accurate and complimentary. One was Bend it Like Beckham. The other was Seabiscuit. For those not familiar with the story, Seabiscuit was a famous racehorse of the Depression era, competing between 1936 and 1940. His career is chronicled in the marvelous book Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand's lengthy, detail-rich narrative is, like many great books, too complex to transfer note for note to film, but writer-director Gary Ross takes on the formidable challenge of bringing Seabiscuit's tale to life on the big screen. Ross wisely chooses to follow Hillenbrand's lead, building the story around the three men who respectively owned, trained, and raced the horse: wealthy auto salesman Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), cowboy Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), and jockey Red Pollard (Tobey Maguire). Ross makes shrewd choices about which details and characters to delete, which events to compress or eliminate altogether, and which aspects of the story to highlight. The result is a wonderful character-driven drama, a story about the power of friendship, love, hope, courage, and never giving up. Ross takes his leisurely time introducing the three men. Seabiscuit himself doesn't even make an appearance until about an hour into the movie, and when he does, he's the catalyst that brings the trio together; the trials and triumphs they experience are all the more satisfying because the viewer understands each character's history. In the process of rebuilding this broken-down racehorse and making him a champion, the three men, each wounded in his own way, also heal each other and mend their broken lives. Inadvertently, they provide millions of Americans with an unlikely cultural icon, an underdog hero who gives ordinary people a badly-needed dose of hope. The story, with its ups, downs, and amazing comeback, might seem mere Hollywood contrivance were it not based on actual events. Even the most casual moviegoer pretty much knows how the tale will end, but that doesn't diminish the enjoyment of it in the least. The tone of the film helps sell its credibility: warmly sentimental without being saccharine or manipulative, funny without being crude or cynical, beautiful without being artsy or pretentious. The tragic moments are doubly powerful because they're filmed with an eloquent understatement. Ross employs a wonderful visual shorthand, conveying just as much in images--if not more so--than he does in dialogue. He delivers a lot of the film's humor with the same technique: abundant one-liners and quick reaction shots produce any number of genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. The cast is uniformly outstanding. Bridges gives a terrific performance; he makes Howard warm and charming and fatherly and likeable, a great guy with a big heart. Cooper's role as Smith is smaller, but he hits exactly the right notes as a survivor of America's vanishing frontier, a man more comfortable with horses than with people. But the undisputed star of the show is Maguire, who is simply luminous as Pollard--as well he should be; the jockey's role was written specifically for him. Pollard has been wounded more deeply and more often then the other two leads, and perhaps for this reason, the viewer's heart goes out to him the most strongly: he's angry and vulnerable, scarred physically and psychologically, but funny and likable and literate, all at the same time. Maguire develops the character beautifully as the movie progresses; the viewer sees Pollard slowly let down his barriers and make connections with his new surrogate family. As wonderful as each performances is, the chemistry that the actors have together is even more notable. It's true ensemble acting; the cast as a whole adds up to more than the sum of its individual players. The supporting folks are also terrific. Elizabeth Banks gives a strong turn as Howard's warm and supportive second wife, Marcela; real-life jockey Gary Stevens makes a confident acting debut as legendary rider George Woolf; and William H. Macy is hilarious as fictional radio personality "Tick Tock" McGlaughlin, who provides much of the movie's humor. Of course, this is also a movie about horse racing, and Ross doesn't disappoint. The races are filmed with an intimate excitement that conveys the beauty, pulse-pounding exhilaration, and sometimes brutality of thoroughbred racing. However, unlike many action movies, the racing sequences never take over the story; they are all the more breathtaking because the viewer knows and cares about the characters who are pouring their lives into these glorious animals. Visually, the movie is a feast. The 1930s are re-created fabulously, from the cars and towns and trains to the characters' smart suits and hats to the wonderful old racetracks. The widescreen cinematography is magnificent, and the lovely score by Randy Newman infuses the movie with equal measures of beauty, humor, and nostalgia. The main complaint critics have leveled at the film center around the use of voice-over narration (handled ably by historian David McCullough) and archival photographs to provide some historical context for the story. This was a risky choice artistically, but it enables Ross to convey the social forces at work in Seabiscuit's world without taking awkward detours in plot and character development. For the most part, the narration is used sparingly and in the right places. A couple of the later sequences could probably have been trimmed out, but they hardly ruin the movie. Probably the only mis-step Ross makes is drawing too many overt parallels between the rebuilding of the racehorse and the rebuilding of the nation via Roosevelt's New Deal. Ross makes it fully clear in the story that Seabiscuit had become a symbol of hope; he didn't need to use the narrative sequences to hammer this point in quite so strongly. Sixty thousand people pouring into a racetrack to watch a horse run for two minutes is testament enough to the affection that Seabiscuit inspired. But even here, Ross isn't too far off the mark: the New Deal may have provided jobs, but Seabiscuit gave people something intangible: the belief that they, too, could overcome the odds and triumph over adversity. Although best seen on a big screen, the DVD will no doubt be chock-full of extra goodies. In the theater or at home, viewers can be assured their money will be well-spent: Seabiscuit is a movie that satisfies on pretty much every level.
Rating:
Summary: Like Seabiscuit himself--a bit awkward, but still a winner
Review: I don't make a habit of reading bestsellers the moment they come out, and sometimes that's a blessing. If a movie version does crop up in the intervening year or two it may take me to get around to a former NYT Bestseller, I can judge it with fresh eyes. Yes, I do believe that nine times out of ten, the book was better, and that perception can sometimes ruin a perfectly good-of-kind movie. As a librarian, I've been hearing the buzz on Laura Hillenbrand's book for the past year and a half now, both from reading the reviews and just from talking to patrons at my library who have read--and almost universally loved it. I did happen to catch a recent PBS documentary on the Seabiscuit phenomenon in which Hillenbrand was interviewed extensively. So I guess I know more about this particular books than the 3,000 others on my list of "must-reads." And watching the movie probably tells me even more about this book that I may or may not get around to reading one day. It's one of those films that is clearly laboring to be faithful to the book that inspired it that it gets a little clunky. The lengthy expositionary scenes are perhaps the best example of what I'm talking about. It takes so long for Seabiscuit to actually arrive on the scene, you may start wondering if you're watching the wrong horse movie. There may have been a more expeditious way to show how Charles Howard made his fortune, for instance, or that his first marriage failed after the tragic death of his son. Conversely, Red Pollard's marriage is not portrayed, even though it was touched upon considerably in the PBS documentary, with his daughter serving as one of the main voices in that film. Some inclusion of that aspect of Pollard's personal life might have been warranted, since without any reference to adult relationships in his life, he comes across as something of a big (if proud and determined) kid. And speaking of kids, given how frequently twenty-something actors play teenagers, did it really make sense to cast another, younger actor in the role of the adolescent Red Pollard--especially one who looks absolutely nothing like Tobey Maguire? Has it really been THAT long since THE ICE STORM? Others have already commented on the questionableness of using documentary footage and stills from the period, and David McCullough's voiceovers seem oddly out of place. I've already seen one PBS doc on this subject, I don't need another. This kind of movie shorthand is just too obvious. A more creative way of establishing time and place would have been preferable. I know that fans of this movie are probably already planning to click on the "unhelpful" button at this point, but ironically or not, I would still recommend SEABISCUIT. Once the film gets past all the exposition, it picks up its pace, literally and figuratively, and turns out to be compelling cinema. The performances are all solid, the cinematography excellent. And you'd have to have a heart of stone to walk out of the movie without a little lump in your throat. SEABISCUIT is one of those movies where a little patience on the viewers' part is eventually rewarded. During the first twenty minutes or so of the screening I attended, there were people who got up and walked out. Too bad for them. As with many a book, and many of the films based on them, it gets better as you go along.
Rating:
Summary: BEST MOVIE EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: Kids, if your going to see a movie in your life, see this. It's great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: A Good Film
Review: This movie is not as good as the book but it is still a very worthwhile film to see. It is beautifully filmed and the racing scenes made me a horse racing fan. I had alway been bored by horse racing on TV and thought I would be by the racing scenes in the film but they were done in such a way that it seemed you were on a horse in the race and really brought home the danger, drama and excitement of the race.
The true story of Seabiscuit has so much heart to it that you can't help but be moved by this movie but the book has so much more heart and soul to it than the film and it gives the complete and accurate story. Some things in the film were changed a little for dramatic effect.
This movie is not the great film it could've been but its many good points even out the flaws. And it is a film for everyone, not just horse lovers. It is not about horse racing, it is about an amazing, spirited, underdog horse finally meeting people who understood him and allowed him to be his best.
No one will regret giving this film a try.
But read the book and watch the PBS documentary.
Rating:
Summary: Seabiscuit
Review: Title: Seabiscuit
Rating: PG 13
Producer: Frank Marshall
Year Produced: 2003
Did you know that the movie "Seabiscuit" was filmed on location? Unlike those 60's movies with the painted background, "Seabiscuit" was actually filmed where it really happened, at Keeneland and Santa Anita, KY. It is a great movie and great story, about a man and his horse, Seabiscuit.
First of all, the special effects are great. There aren't very many of them (since it was filmed on location), but when they are there, they are awesome. You wouldn't even know that they aren't really happening other than the fact that they knew the actors would get hurt. They make it look so real, that you really think that the actors would be hurt, but they aren't.
Also, the music in the movie is wonderful too. It matches with the scenes perfectly. When there is a scene with suspense, there is fast paced music. When there is a sad scene, there is slow, sad music. The music in general, just as background music, is awesome to. If they decide to make a soundtrack to the movie, I would get it the first day it comes out, regardless of how much it costs.
Next, the skills of the actors are some of the best I have ever seen in my life. Tobey McGuire does an
excellent job acting as "Red" Pollard, who is the jockey, and all of the other actors do a great job as their characters too. The actors are perfect for the job and make lots of connections with the character they play.
Last but not least, the story in general is great. Almost any movie that involves the main characters as a man and an animal is good, and this is no exception. It is all about how a wild horse is caught and no one can get it to calm down or stay still. But when a special trainer comes to the horse, the horse just seems to calm down and stay still. And the only jockey that the horse will trust is Red Pollard. Together they form a team so good that they when more races than any other horse, except one. The only horse that they haven't raced yet, is the only one that has won just as many as Seabiscuit has won. But, the owner of the race is too scared to race, until the Seabiscuit team starts to chase after them. Then the big race happens. You will have to see the movie in order to find out the rest of the movie. But anyways, "Seabiscuit" is, no doubt, the best animal movie that I have ever seen.
Overall, I would give this movie, on a scale from one to ten, a nine. I loved this movie and if you haven't seen it yet, you would love it too. I recommend this movie to anyone who loves action, suspense and thriller movies. It is a great movie for people of all ages. However, they may need to be at least 12 years old, because there 35 curse words in it. Yet, it will help people in life because it will inspire them to go after dreams no matter what obstacles may lie. So what are you waiting for? Go see "Seabiscuit"!
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