"Now: I’m a fan of empathy, if not of Sarah Palin. And I’m of the opinion that any movie that can get you to feel this way, that can actually crack open that level of compassion for someone you actively hate, deserves close consideration. I have an entire meditation practice, so that I can cultivate those feelings about people I dislike, and for the most part, it doesn’t work. I sit there, attempting to feel compassion for some blogger dude who freaked out on me for being too feminist, and I just crack up laughing. This movie got me to feel a level of kindness, for a despised person, that I can rarely feel."

"Still, Secretariat makes many of us pine for a simpler, more innocent era when hooved beasts bestrode the earth's cinemas."

"Over the course of his career, Mann has produced a taut, stylistic and often brutally impersonal filmography that seems most interested in the concept of work. His movies are preoccupied with how men (almost always men) of extraordinary skills practice their craft -- and the price they must pay for doing so."

Re: Secretariat: "You wouldn't think of this as a family film but it is a film that plays for families. In the fall, those kind of movies tend to show strong legs.... Now we just need to convince the people on the coasts to see the movie." Good luck. [Secretariat box office 10/8-10/10, $12.6 million. BEL handle same period, $26.7 million. OTH, $21.2 million.] See also: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-box-office-20101011,0,4671549.story

"I think when you take the beautiful Diane Lane and turn her into a frumpy aged-up woman, you're flirting with danger. Then there's the whole horse thing, which is probably second only to boxing in moviegoing 'who cares?'." Also, for comparison: "Seabiscuit from Universal opened with $20.8M over the weekend of July 25, 2003."

"When that corresponds to the kind of tremendous athletic talent we see in the Belmont -- talent that sets him not just above but a whole category apart from the other horses -- we see what seems to be impossible, a vision of where our understanding of limitations and categories breaks down, and something almost supernatural emerges. Not for nothing did Jack Whitaker on national TV resort years later to the Andalusian term Duende, usually applied to the effects of the performing arts or poetry, to describe Secretariat's eerie accomplishment ..."

"If Americans love to root for the underdog, they may love to root for the favorite disguised as the underdog even more."

"At each stage of his career, Secretariat's winning times and speed figures provided objective evidence that he was an extraordinary runner. His greatest performance, of course, was the Belmont Stakes, where he dueled with Sham at a seemingly suicidal pace for three-quarters of a mile and proceeded to draw away to a 31-length victory. The prevailing track record, Gallant Man's 2:26 3/5, was considered almost unassailable; only one other winner in the Belmont's history had run faster than 2:28. When Secretariat crossed the finish line in 2:24 flat, he had raced into a new dimension."

"They’ll be looking for the same sort of uptick at the gate that tracks saw when 'Seabiscuit' was released in 2003."

Penny Chenery: “No, we didn’t have a spiritual connection. We had a mutual respect, but he didn’t stand still long enough for me to look in his eye and say a prayer. He was smart, and a ham. He knew when he won. And he knew when he lost.”

"Not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with either football mom Leigh Anne Tuohy or horse breeder Penny Chenery’s stories — anything but. It’s just that the implications for their other subjects are more than a little troublesome. “My meeting with the marketing team to EXPLAIN the problem would start thusly,” tweeted NPR’s Monkey See blog. 'Secretariat … was … a … HORSE.' The mind reels, the skin crawls, etc." See: http://twitter.com/nprmonkeysee/status/25843918258 http://twitter.com/nprmonkeysee/status/25844093216

"That Disney has been marketing its Oct. 8 release 'Secretariat' to horse aficionados and sports enthusiasts is obvious. But unless you're an influential Christian -- preferably one with a popular website -- you probably didn't know that the studio also has been leaning on the strategy employed by 'The Blind Side' by going after what industry insiders like to call the 'faith-based audience.'"

"The truth of the matter is, despite a racing industry that constantly cries about a lack of mainstream attention, there's an awful lot of horse racing everywhere you look." Secretariat, Luck two big opportunities for the industry.

"Last month, over the phone from his home in Chevy Chase, he said that 'the arc of the movie is accurate. Penny took over the horse farm when her father was dying, and left her family and went East to run the career of this racehorse. It made her and her husband estranged; she had a very difficult time. But she managed to start another life. She ended up blending in well with the Establishment, and she was much admired. That is the guts of the movie -- and it's all true.' Beyond that, Nack said, Wallace got the pastoral and the prickly textures right."

"Now it's time for the men to be drawn in with the newest poster, which you can see below. No more pretty sunsets or goofy 70s period clothing -- just a horse, running like hell, looking like a champion."

"I wanted the audience to participate too, and not just sit back and watch it. That's a problem with our society: It's been all too easy for us to become spectators in life, and I want to be a participant and I want the audience to share that too."

From N+1FR, issue one, on I Am Love. "The film is too much in love with beauty to be anything but pretty, and by the end it’s corrupted by the system it indicts."

"The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers voluntarily expose themselves to it."

"Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema."

Documentary, now in production, about women jockeys