Seabiscuit

I saw the movie "Seabiscuit" last night.  Another horse movie.  It was good, I thought.  Jeff Bridges is a great actor and Chris Cooper and Tobey McGuire were also good.  I liked how they described the Depression and cut photographs from the period into the story.  Of course, the horse races are terrifically exciting.  But the greatest horse race on film in my opinion is the one from "The Black Stallion" directed by Caroll Ballard.  It is so beautiful and expresses the relationship between the boy and the horse so movingly.  It's a great movie.  The book is pretty good, too.  It is the first book that really caught Anthony's interest.

I also saw "Middle of the Night" which is a Paddy Chayevsky screenplay.  He liked to write about regular people and I was quite impressed with how modern and open the movie was, even though it was made in 1959.  It stars Frederick March and Kim Novak.  March was great as the old man obsessed with the young beautiful woman in his office.  Kim Novak was really awful.  She is so beautiful, but her performances are always so jerky and mannered.  She's trying to play a kind of mixed up, shy short of person and her way of doing that is to jerk her head around wildly which is really distracting.  I didn't like the ending, which was a kind of happy one, because I couldn't believe that it would be.