Posted on 09/01/2003 10:45:15 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Was it just my imagination, or did I detect a lot of knee-jerk political reactions in the reviews of "Seabiscuit"?
That movie should have been just another horse opera with a great come-from-behind ending -- like "National Velvet." Instead it proved a kind of ideological litmus test.
Well, sure. From movies to sitcoms, everything's got a political subtext these days -- except maybe politics itself. There's no sub- to its text: raw ambition and competing interests. Both are out there in the open.
But when it came to "Seabiscuit," the reviewers' ideological preferences seemed to weigh heavily in their esthetic judgment. Separate but equally political interpretations abounded.
One reviewer bridged the left-right gap by expressing both in the same review. Novelist and horseracing fan Jane Smiley first accused the movie of being too soft on the tycoon who's one of the heroes:
"Seabiscuit's owner never does anything robber-baronish or even selfish. In the middle of the Depression, he refuses to lay off his workers. He makes speeches about the common man. He is not Ken Lay, Enron's former CEO"
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
The Epilog about how she interviewed to get first-hand accounts is fascinating and worthy of becoming another book.
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