I watched "The Cup" at Cedar Square yesterday and found it surprisingly gripping and entertaining. Brendan Gleeson looks no more like Dermot Weld than Humpty Dumpty but invests the character with a brusque Gaelic charm and Stephen Curry is convincing as Damien Oliver. The horse that plays Media Puzzle is also not too bad in the role - he certainly looks just like him. There's a nice cameo by an uncredited actor in the role of Frankie Dettori, who rode Pugin, for Godolphin, in that 2002 Melbourne Cup. Saeed Bin Suroor is played by an actor who is a lot better looking than the Godolphin trainer, but who gets the voice almost right.
The movie has taken a bit of a pasting from the critics, particularly in Australia, but the director, Simon Wincer has a great track record, with films like "Phar Lap" (far superior to this one), to his credit, and at least he gets all the racing details correct. I can personally remember playing a villian in a local mini-series with a racing theme, entitled "The Syndicate", and in one scene they caught a horse running loose in a forest and fitted it with blinkers to load it into a horse float. The jockeys in that one looked like overweight prize fighters.
Now for a feature-length movie on our own Sea Cottage to remind South Africans that we once had a grand and glorious racing past, but, until then, you can catch a much longer, re-edited version of Aidan Lithgow's Sea Cottage documentary all this week, in the cinema at the TBA complex. Extended versions of the Hawaii, Gatecrasher and Politician stories are also on view, as is an assemblage of two hours of racing newsreel footage from way back when, to take you on a nostalgia trip. It's all a foretaste of the "Legends" series, which has been in production solidly for over three years and which will hopefully be completed in the not too distant future, to give horse racing a much needed boost to its rather sorry public image.
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