Critic On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown
...in its totality "Secretariat" is a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse
Come again? He sees the film as a fantasy for conservative Christians and Tea Partiers (which are probably synonymous in his mind).
...the blond, privileged Penny Chenery and her superhorse [are] posed as emblems of American ingenuity and power against the villainous, swarthy and vaguely terrorist-flavored Pancho Martin (Nestor Serrano), trainer of Sham, Secretariat's archrival. (Even the horse's name is evil!)
[...]
Big Red himself is a big, handsome MacGuffin, symbolic window dressing for a quasi-inspirational fantasia of American whiteness and power.
As I said, I haven't seen the film. Maybe he's right. But it sure seems like he's reading his own paranoia into the plot. Don't worry Andrew, the elections will soon be over. If the Republicans lose, you can breathe easier. If they win, you can go back to blaming everything on them.
PS He just put up an "explanation" of his review which doesn't really change anything.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:05 AM
3 Comments:
I just read his review, Ebert's take-down of it (which is brilliant, by the way) and his reply.
O'Hehir clearly has no idea of what many of his terms mean. For example, he says this film is "master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl", and in his follow-up he defends this claim by explaining:
In my view, the most effective propaganda movies are not the ones about dudes with guns that espouse militarism, or the Soviet boy-meets-tractor films, or the Nazi cartoons about Jews. Those are too obvious. The most effective kind of propaganda depicts normal life, or rather an idealized vision of normal life, one that (as one of my readers put it) "makes a particular worldview seem natural, right and appealing."
Now, that might indeed be the most effective kind of propaganda. But it is completely unlike Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda -- a fact that he seems oblivious to.
And his claim that 1969-1973 was "the most tumultous period in American history" simply shows that he isn't aware of how big America is. Secretariat was trained in Virginia, home of Penny Chenery's father. Penny was born in 1922. If O'Hehir thinks that a movie about a fifty year old woman in 1972 Virginia ought to focus on the counter-culture and student unrest, he simply has no clue that New York City and Berkeley are not the only places that exist in this country.
This is a film about a horse. Breeding horses is not like breeding humans.
Try telling that to PETA.
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