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DVD Hidalgo (Full Screen Edition)
Director Joe Johnston has always had an entertaining sense of adventure, and with Hidalgo he proves it in spades. It's yet another underrated film for Johnston (along with such enjoyable popcorn flicks as The Rocketeer and Jurassic Park III), dismissed by many critics but a welcome treat for anyone drawn to good ol'-fashioned movie excitement. In his first role since playing Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Viggo Mortensen brings handsome appeal to his low-key portrayal of Frank T. Hopkins, a real-life long-distance horse racer who, as the movie opens, has witnessed the appalling massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. Drifting into Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, he agrees to compete, with his trusty mustang, Hidalgo, in "The Ocean of Fire," a treacherous 3,000-mile horse race across the Arabian desert. Toss in a bunch of conspiring competitors, a noble sheik (Omar Sharif), his lovely daughter (Zuleikha Robinson), and enough fast-paced danger to fill 133 minutes, and you've got a rousing, humorous, and lightly spiritual adventure that's a lot of fun to watch. It hardly matters that it's almost pure fiction (the real Hopkins was known by many as "a pathological liar"). More important is the love of movies and moviemaking that Johnston so delightfully conveys. --Jeff Shannon
"Hidalgo" is a great little throwback to dimestore Westerns and high adventure ala heroes such as the Lone Ranger and Lash LaRue. Viggo Mortensen plays Frank T. Hopkins, an actual person who played a key role in the survival of the American Mustang. Other than that, I don't know much about the man. According to this tale, which is full of popcorn fluff that's perfect for a lazy evening at home, Hopkins competes in a race across the "Ocean of Fire" in order to keep his horse's good name as the greatest distance racer ever.
The story begins with Hopkins witnessing the tragedy at Wounded Knee, which holds a special place in his heart since his mother was Native American. After this, he joins Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. While with this traveling group, he is challenged by a shiek to prove that his horse is the greatest distance racer around in a great race across the boring but deadly deserts of Arabia.
What follows is a typical but enjoyable yarn with one foot firmly planted in Wild West adventure and the other set down with care in heritage and blood ties. The Arabian desert supplies plenty of the dangers for our hero, such as sandstorms, raiders, locusts, and the like. Hopkins also runs into an Arabian beauty and a shiek with rather loose reins on his daughter for a man of that time. All the while, he struggles with himself over his heritage, which he has hidden for very long.
The only thing that fails to impress in this film is the setting. As dangerous as it can be, the desert becomes rather dull to watch on the screen. At least mid-America has wheatfields, the "Ocean of Fire" has a couple of camels and a few backstabbing racers. That's it, not much else.
However, if you can look beyond the bleak surroundings of our hero and his wonderful horse, you'll find plenty of adventure and "aw, shucks" humor to really enjoy this flick.
It's rated PG-13 primarily for the violence. Some of it is very extreme for younger children, especially when raiders enter the tent city and Hopkins, the shiek, and others whip up on them. If you enjoy Indiana Jones-like adventure and humor however, "Hidalgo" will be right up your alley, pardner.
Near-total lack of Authenticity
Hidalgo is quite enjoyable and entertaining. To western eyes it probably also looks exotic. But take it from a native of Arabia, in terms of authenticity in production design the movie scores a zero. Nothing, and I mean nothing about the costumes, locations, character names or language is authentic. Hollywood likes to shoot in Morocco when the story takes place in a desert and elements of North African culture stick out like sore thumbs all over the movie. The "look" of Hidalgo is a hotchpotch of African and perceived Arabian cultures. The clothes worn by Arab characters have never existed in Arabian history. They look like costumes left over from a Halloween party. The only authentic clothes are Moroccan. But what are Western Sahara horsemen doing in central Arabia? The two regions are thousands of miles apart and the cultural contrast between them is strong. You see Jaffa (Peter Mensah) serving Arabian coffee in the wrong cups and with the left hand. In Arabia you only serve your guests with the right hand unless you mean to insult them. The names of Arab characters are completely wrong for the location or the period; some are not even people names. The Arab characters speak in classical Arabic, the use of which is correct since there is no surviving record of 19th century Central Arabian dialect. The American actors deserve praise for the effort they put in learning their Arabic lines; but why is the man announcing the start of the race Moroccan in appearance and dialect? To be fair, the producers did put some effort to avoid making this a story about an all-conquering white man in the land of the Brown People. The main character is half-native American, a race that enjoys respect in the Arab world. Unusually for Hollywood, most of the Arab characters are not villains or imbeciles. Mercifully, Arabs are not portrayed by painted white actors but by African Americans (Hispanics are also suitable for portraying Arabs). One element of Hidalgo that was authentic is the Arabs love for horses and their pride in them. I managed through the distracting cultural inaccuracies to enjoy the movie by pretending that the story takes place in a fictitious land populated by fictitious people with a fictitious culture, have fictitious names and wear fictitious clothes. Most people will also enjoy Hidalgo. I would simply like them to keep in mind that almost nothing about the Arabia they see in it is authentic.
Great movie
One of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I have a copy and have ordered this copy for my brother. I keep praising this actor and the movie to everyone.
Like a Hardy Boys mystery on steroids, National Treasure offers popcorn thrills and enough boyish charm to overcome its rampant silliness. Although it was roundly criticized as a poor man's rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Da Vinci Code, it's entertaining on its own ludicrous terms, and Nicolas Cage proves once again that one actor's infectious enthusiasm can compensate for a multitude of movie sins. The contrived plot involves Cage's present-day quest for the ancient treasure of the Knights Templar, kept secret through the ages by Freemasons past and present. Finding the treasure requires the theft of the Declaration of Independence (there are crucial treasure clues on the back, of course!), so you can add "caper comedy" to this Jerry Bruckheimer... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Jon Turteltaub DVD Release Date: Released the 03 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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There are many reasons to recommend Troy as a good ol' fashioned Hollywood epic, especially if you've never read Homer's The Iliad. Dispensing with Greek gods altogether, this earnestly massive production (budgeted at upwards of $200 million) will surely offend historians and devoted students of the classics (for them, there's the History Channel's Troy). But there's politics aplenty in the grand-scale war that erupts when Trojan prince Paris (Orlando Bloom) makes off with Helen (blandly beautiful German model Diane Kruger), wife of Spartan ruler Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), whose brother, the Greek king Agamemnon (Brian Cox) prods him into enraged retaliation. Greek warrior Achilles (Brad Pitt) brings lethal force to his battles (and there are many of them, mostly... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Wolfgang Petersen DVD Release Date: Released the 04 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Supreme silliness doesn't stop The Day After Tomorrow from being lots of fun for connoisseurs of epic-scale disaster flicks. After the blockbuster profits of Independence Day and Godzilla, you can't blame director Roland Emmerich for using global warming as a politically correct excuse for destroying most of the northern hemisphere. Like most of Emmerich's films, this one emphasizes special effects over such lesser priorities as well-drawn characters and plausible plotting, and his dialogue (cowritten by Jeffrey Nachmanoff) is so laughably trite that it could be entirely eliminated without harming the movie. It's the spectacle that's important here, not the lame, recycled plot about father and son (Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal) who endure an end-of-the-world scenario... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dennis Quaid - Jake Gyllenhaal - Emmy Rossum Director(s): Roland Emmerich DVD Release Date: Released the 12 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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As paranoid cop Del Spooner, Will Smith (Independence Day, Men in Black) displays both his trademark quips and some impressive pectoral muscles in I, Robot. Only Spooner suspects that the robots that provide the near future with menial labor are going to turn on mankind--he's just not sure how. When a leading roboticist dies suspiciously, Spooner pursues a trail that may prove his suspicions. Don't expect much of a connection to Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction stories; I, Robot, the action movie, isn't prepared for any ruminations on the significance of artificial intelligence. This likable, efficient movie won't break any new ground, but it does have an idea or two to accompany its jolts and thrills, which puts it ahead of most recent action flicks.... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Will Smith - Bridget Moynahan - Bruce Greenwood Director(s): Alex Proyas DVD Release Date: Released the 14 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Like a roller coaster ready to fly off its rails, Van Helsing rockets to maximum velocity and never slows down. Having earned blockbuster clout with The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, writer-director Stephen Sommers once again plunders Universal's monster vault and pulls out all the stops for this mammoth $148-million action-adventure-horror-comedy, which opens (sans credits) with a terrific black-and-white prologue that pays homage to the Universal horror classics that inspired it. The plot pits legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) against Dracula (the deliciously campy Richard Roxburgh), his deadly blood-sucking brides, and the Wolfman (Will Kemp) in a two-hour parade of outstanding special effects (980 in all) that turn Sommers' juvenile plot... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Hugh Jackman - Kate Beckinsale - Richard Roxburgh - Shuler Hensley - Will Kemp Director(s): Stephen Sommers DVD Release Date: Released the 19 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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