Monday, May 15, 2006

Now I know what to do with that extra waffle iron

We watched about 20 minutes of the film Prefontaine last night. I've been reading these articles about Bill Bowerman, Steve Prefontaine, and the University of Oregon track team in Runners' World lately (I think there are a couple of books coming out), and got an interest in seeing these characters played out in film. After the film had already arrived from Netflix, however, I read a blurb in RW about all of the training Billy Crudup had done so that he could realistically portray Prefontaine. Since the movie we had starred Jared Leto and not Billy Crudup, I started to realize that perhaps I hadn't gotten the best film.

There was a bit on NPR a few months ago talking about the art of creating a movie trailer. Insert the right song, and you've got a mood and a feeling about what the film is all about. This works well when the mood and quality of the music in the trailer matches that of the film. Prefontaine, staring Jared Leto, is an example of when good (or in many cases trite) music and a pretty face were about all the film had going for it. The portion of the movie that we saw just felt like a montage of classic film clips from the late '60's and early '70's. The other entertaining part was watching Leto run around with his overdeveloped "vanity muscles" (biceps, shoulders, etc.) on skinny little legs. He had obviously spent time in the gym, but he didn't exactly look like a record-setting track star. My favorite discovery, though, was this user comment written by jonny-deppfan185.

2 Comments:

Blogger eileen said...

So random- I watched Prefontaine last night and it was terrible! The fake documentary style of it made it seem like it was almost supposed to be a comedy.

7:26 AM  
Blogger Tricia said...

Funny coincidence... at times I felt like they were just copying the Forest Gump soundtrack ("if we just play this song here, it will feel like Vietnam protests are happening..."). Without Limits is en route to the house, so hopefully we'll enjoy that one a little more.

4:24 PM  

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