Such is my love of Dakota Fanning, I genuinely didn’t expect to find a match for Dreamer here, though I’d read plenty of reviews that mentioned the similarities between the two movies, similarities that turn out to be even more abundant than the obvious “little girl takes horse to unlikely victory” storyline … right down to lines about dreams, ‘the importance of folly’ here, in Dreamer there’s a line, along the lines of, “yes it’s a foolish dream, but let it take her as far as it can”. There’s a lot of parallels.

The big differences are that it’s less the horse than the girl who’s the underdog here, and that Elizabeth Taylor actually rides the horse in the finale. I wanted Dreamer to go this way: then, I guess it’d would be less “inspired by a true story” than, “ripped off from National Velvet”, lol. I guess you could argue the reasons Dakota doesn’t ride her horse in her movie … there’s the fact that the “true story” moniker requires more realism in the execution, and the fact that Dakota, though close to the same age as Taylor here, looks so much younger and would therefore look even less likely on the back of a racehorse; I’d argue that realism kinda goes against the whole title of that movie, let alone the theme

But, yeh, enough about Dakota and Dreamer In a day that looked like it was going to be full of unsurprisingly disappointing oldies, this was by far the highlight viewing for me. I’ve kinda fallen for Elizabeth Taylor before in movies like the obvious Place in the Sun and the more obscure Sandpiper, but never as much as I did here. She’s absolutely adorable, and looks at least a couple of years above her actual age. It’s almost impossible to believe this was her first big role. Then there’s the actress who plays her mother, Anne Revere, who won an Oscar for her supporting role, simply wonderful. The photography, so early on in the days of technicolor, is pretty amazing … I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an early camera move so fast as in the horse sequences, it was kind of a shock to see so much energy in such an old movie. There are a few phony-looking ‘blue-screen’ shots (rear projection? travelling matte? I forget the terminology lol, forgive my beer-ridden brain) and obvious matte painting backgrounds, etc but nothing out of the ordinary for the time – overall, this is a near-perfect production in every way. Gasp almost forgot to mention the music by Herbert Stothart … it’s wonderful. I know, need to learn more adjectives.

I can’t deny, though, having said this is better than Dreamer and all, this movie really put me in one of my horsey moods … I’ll have to follow this with Dreamer, Spirit, Seabiscuit etc, sometime soon

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 6:45 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews and tagged as cuties, horses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.