BEFORE: Toni Collette carries over from "Jesus Henry Christ", and, really, she'll be here until Friday, five films total, which should give her a good jump on everyone else, she should be leading the league at the end of January, if I'm not mistaken. Hey, Dale Dickey had a great January last year, now it's Toni's turn.
I know nothing about this film, really I know almost nothing about maybe 3 of these 5 Toni Collette films, but I'm hitting Hulu and Netflix hard this month, trying to make some headway on those queues, but really, it's like trying to catch air, no matter how hard I try the lists keep on growing and there are literally more films streaming every month than I could possibly watch. I've had to increase the main watchlist from 200 to 225 and the secondary (streaming) watch list from 300 to 325. So I always have about 550 films to choose from now when I build my chains. My fear is that if I increase that number too much, then I'll have too many choices and I won't be able to narrow them down to the "right one", but so far that hasn't happened. Hey, I was able to build a chain from "The Worst Person in the World" to my first February film that was 27 films long, and then once I knew that it was possible to get from HERE to THERE, I found I could pad it just a little bit until it filled January, right on the nose.
THE PLOT: Dream Alliance is an unlikely race horse bred by small-town Welsh bartender Jan Vokes. With no experience, Jan convinces her neighbors to chip in their meager earnings to help raise Dream, in the hopes he can compete with the racing elites.
AFTER: Well, we all love a sports story, right? Especially when the star is an underdog and comes from behind to SOMEHOW win, just because they WANT IT MORE. Damn, but that formula still continues to work, whether it's "Creed" or "The Mighty Ducks" or "Major League". (Yes, I didn't say "Rocky" because we all know Rocky didn't win, not in the first film, anyway, he just went the distance, but that was kind of like winning.). It''s a bit different when the sport is horse racing and the title character is, you know, a horse - but here it's the people in that small Welsh town who invested their money in the horse, just a tenner a week for two years, that's all it took, and somehow, that little horse that could went and DID because his owners wanted it more, or something.
Sure, the odds were against these amateur horse breeders and investors, the film keeps making that point abundantly clear - so for every group of townies that breeds a superior winning horse, there simply must be at least 99 groups of horse owners who just aren't as lucky. And Jan Vokes may have no experience or expertise in horse breeding, but she took a lot of notes on the subject, a whole notebook's worth, so that must be the secret sauce, right? Or it's just plain luck, that's possible too.
Oh, yeah, sorry, I suppose a SPOILER ALERT is in order, but hey, I jokingly said the same thing about the film "Napoleon". (Or "Titanic", did anyone NOT know that the ship sinks at the end?). There was previously a documentary called "Dark Horse" that detailed how this small town grocery cashier and part-time barmaid got her husband to buy her a broodmare, and then she figured out the process of getting her horse, umm, impregnated by a male horse, which you think might happen naturally, but no, you kind of have to arrange for this AND pay for this, basically it's horse prostitution but they call it a "stud fee" I think. Anyway don't even try to pick a horse to have sex with YOUR horse unless you have at least one full notebook full of charts and measurements and diagrams and stuff. That's the key to success right there.
Jan and Brian have success, sort of - a baby horse is born, only its mother dies shortly after giving birth. That couldn't possibly screw up the baby horse at all, could it? What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Will this create a wild horse that can't be controlled because it never had the nurturing touch of a mother's love? Or will Jan take on the role of mother figure and somehow impart all of her hopes and dreams and anxieties on to this baby horse, which the syndicate agrees to call "Dream Alliance" (except Kerby, who wants to name the horse "Kerby", but come on, that's so Kerby of him...)
And why does Jan want to do all this in the first place? Because she needs a reason to get up in the morning, she says. Yeah, working at a grocery store by day and a bar at night will do that to you - I've got the same problem, only it's with an animation studio and a movie theater. You work two jobs just to have a little more spending cash, only then you're spending so much TIME working those two jobs that you rarely get out and just have fun, like you used to. Prices keep going up and you find you've got less to spend on books and video-games like you used to, and when you do think to arrange a vacation or a weekend getaway somewhere you've got to clear that with TWO bosses, and no wonder you're tired all the time, because one job wants you in at 10 am and the other one wants you to start at 5 pm and lock up at 11. Yeah, I feel you, Jan.
Now, horse racing in the U.K. apparently is very different than the racing in the U.S. (Don't even get me started on their "football" - it doesn't even seem like the same sport at all!). The UK races are more like what we call steeplechases, there are barriers that the horses have to hurdle over, like who builds a track for horses to run on, and then puts up hurdles to make it more difficult? Seems kind of stupid. Should there be a big six-foot wall around home plate so runners from third base can't get to it? Or why not have a big wall of fire down the center court line during an NBA game, so players have to run really fast through it so they don't get burned? Stupid, right?
So Dream Alliance doesn't finish one race because he injures a leg on one of those hurdles, and in most instances, a leg injury means a horse has to be shot for some stupid reason, I've heard various reasons for this over the years but none of them seem to make sense, I mean we have veterinarians who operate on animals all the time, why did horses become the only animals we "humanely" kill when they sprain an ankle? More ridiculous rules of society that make no sense, I mean you invest all this money in a race horse over the years, and then one little broken leg and he has to die? There are no horse casts or horse crutches or horse wheelchairs? They make little doggie wheelchairs now or dogs can learn to run on three legs, so we don't kill THEM if they're missing a leg, and haven't horses done as much as dogs over the centuries to help mankind, if not more? Oh sure, please Mr. Horse, pull my wagon, pull my plow, help me get this mail to San Francisco quickly, but if you break a leg I will kill you in a heartbeat? It's not fair.
Anyway, the syndicate has to come together to decide if Dream Alliance can be saved instead of shot, and then once he's recovered, can he or should he race again? And so they have to take a vote, but it's unclear if people are voting in their own best interests or for those of the horse. I mean, sure, it's just a horse, but it's a horse that might be able to win another race, or it's a horse that maybe could be sold to another owner, or then put out to stud himself. But Jan has to learn that bringing in 19 other investors to form a syndicate means that she's not the only owner of the horse, the other owners want to have a say in what happens to their investment, also. Really, this should have all been spelled out in the initial offering agreement, and if it wasn't, well why not?
Well, this is a sports movie so you can expect that there's a rollicking happy ending, but bear in mind that for every horse that wins a race, there are another 8 or 9 who didn't, but you know what, this movie isn't about them, is it? If one of them had won the Welsh Grand National then maybe the movie WOULD be about them, but they didn't, so it's not. That's just how these things tend to work. Deal with it.
Also starring Owen Teale (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Alan David (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Lynda Baron (last seen in "Yentl"), Damian Lewis (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Karl Johnson (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Steffan Rhodri (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Rhys ap William, Carwyn Glyn, Sian Phillips (last seen in "The Age of Innocence"), Benji Wild, Anthony O'Donnell (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Darren Evans (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Di Botcher (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Rekha John-Cheriyan (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Brian Doherty, Ashq Akhtar (last seen in "Blinded By the Light"), Max Hutchinson, Aneirin Hughes, Nicholas Farrell (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Alex Jordan (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Joanna Page (last seen in "Dolittle"), Adam Sopp (last seen in "Last Night in Soho"), Peter Davison, Raj Paul, Katherine Jenkins, Clare Balding, Gerald Royston Horler, Rhys Horler, Katrina Maving and the real-life Jan Vokes, Brian Vokes.
RATING: 7 out of 10 unintelligible words in the Welsh National Anthem
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