*** – “Secretariat” was the first and best of a large number of movies (including several I have already seen, such as “Man on Fire”, “Mystic River”, “Next” and inexplicably “Captain Ron”) that I watched on various plane and bus rides during my ten day journey to, in and back from Chile - a land of extraordinary beauty which I recommend everyone visit if they have the opportunity, by the way. I don’t give a shit one way or the other about horse racing and pay no attention to who wins what or the back stories therein, so I have no ground on which to stand in saying that this movie, while being pretty entertaining to watch and portraying 1973 very authentically, feels heavily fabricated. There are just too many characters that fall into movie character molds, from the woman who inherits a failing horse racing operation and against all odds turns things around, to the down-on-his-luck trainer who is hired by the woman and makes a winner out of the horse that nobody wanted but ends up a champion. That’s way too many storybook fairy tale endings for one film. Whether or not all those things are true or not, they just don’t feel true. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, just really hard to believe. It probably deserves higher than the rating I gave, but I really don’t like horses, and I think horse racing is one of the dumbest sports around (along with NASCAR and frolf). Plus, that Diane Lane just rubs me the wrong way for some reason.
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