So, Secretariat is clearly a feel-good, obstacles-overcome sports story, designed, as Vulture says, "to make grown men cry." Despite that freakish and slightly annoying genetic engineering, I think there's one thing that might make this movie different than its predecessors, and therefore more watchable: the recognition that people who are supremely confident about underdogs may be right, but they also are probably supremely strange:
Cue John Malkovich. And the weirdly sexy voiceover at the beginning. And I really like the intense, candy-colored palate.
I also really like that the movie's apparently going to explore some of the anachronisms of Southern female rebellion in the early seventies. Penny Tweedy's an interesting combination--a Virginian with a Smith College degree who met her husband in business school at Columbia, who also was still sort of a perfect picture of Southern womanhood into the 1970's as the women's movement advanced elsewhere in the country. It took ten years after Secretariat's Triple Crown win for her to be elected to the Jockey Club, and she's not listed as Secretariat's breeder, even though she was the one who made the mating decision that lead to his birth. So frequently the conflicts in sports movies have to do with race (often quite justifiably, it's not as if I don't think race is an issue in sports, or that sports haven't been a huge proving ground for racial equality, I totally do) that I'm curious to see one that focuses more on gender (although I will be curious to see if the movie deals with race in the horse business). Diane Lane is sexy and tough as hell, and given some of the trash she's been in recently, I hope she makes a serious meal of this role.