Word: pollards
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SEABISCUIT. Based on a true story, this film chronicles the trials and tribulations of horse Seabiscuit and his former prize-fighting jockey Red Pollard, played by Tobey Maguire. With the help of a millionaire portrayed by Jeff Bridges, Pollard turns the once losing Seabiscuit into a champion—and a symbol of hope in the process. Racing in the midst of the Great Depression, Seabiscuit becomes an inspiration to his fans. Seabiscuit screens...
...ornery, undersize, beaten-up Thoroughbred who becomes a champion in the 1930s. Seabiscuit is discovered by a broken-down cowboy (Chris Cooper) and a rich dilettante named Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges), who nurse him back to health. They need a rider who can handle him. Enter Maguire as Red Pollard, a bitter, washed-up jockey who was abandoned by his parents as a kid, then grew up too tall to make the big time. Along the way, Pollard lost the sight in one eye, and by the time Team Seabiscuit finds him he's boxing on the side (and losing...
Howard recognizes Pollard as a kindred spirit for his stubborn steed and takes him in, becoming a kind of surrogate father to the angry, abandoned Red. "You kind of see his safe, secure, loving world get crushed, and you see his boyishness just drain out of him," Maguire explains. "He toughens up and withdraws and keeps himself guarded. And then you see that melt away again as he becomes part of this family." Watching Red slowly learn to trust those around him, you realize that Maguire has taken his standard boy-becomes-man routine and subverted it. He plays...
There's enough of Pollard in Maguire--the guardedness, the tough childhood--to make a journalist's Spidey-sense tingle, but Maguire is emphatically not into making those kinds of connections. "My trust issues? I may have some," he says. "Having my guard up? I may do that. I don't sit there and pick out experiences or traits of mine. That would be more for Gary Ross to do. For me, I'm just playing the part...
Barry's book is a satire set in a nightmare future. William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (Putnam; 356 pages) is a serious thriller set in the dystopian present. Gibson, best known for the seminal cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, tells the story of Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter" who gets paid to spot hot new trends for marketers. In her private life, Cayce is obsessed with a series of short films that have appeared anonymously on the Internet. These are enigmatic, surreal scraps of footage that exude an overwhelming melancholy--kind of like the video in The Ring, but sad, not scary. Trouble...