Horsemen

The Haunting in Connecticut (Single-Disc Edition)
$29.95
Never once have I watched a movie that was so poorly entwined with the true stories of the family that it happened to. You could tell the director and producers of this movie only made it for the money and not for the intention of spreading the TRUE story of the haunting in Connecticut!

Needless to say I spent the entire length of the movie yelling at the screen because I knew the real story. I yelled worse towards the end because the house NEVER caught on fire in the true story as well!

If you're into the horror movies that have their own tales then this is your movie, but if you want the real story brought to the screen this is NOT the movie you're looking for.

NONE of this movie was based on the true events other than the young boy being sick, and then they don't go into detail on how he was sick! The young boy really has cancer (which later after moving away from the house he recovered, went into remission, and later became cancer free). There is no story as to the boy living in the basement of the house with the dark figure man (who everyone called the devil) who was telling the boy to kill his family.

Long story short, watch the "A Haunting" on TV to try to catch the REAL story.

The Horsemen
$24.96
If you thought Omar Sharif was moody in Lawrence of Arabia, you ain't seen nothing yet!

This is a story about a father and son, and the love-hate relationship between them. Uraz (Omar Sharif's character) wants to get out of his daddy's shadow. Tursun (Jack Palance), the father, is an aging old man who can't show his son that he loves them. Father and son are both chapandaz, master horsemen and semi-professionals who play the game called Buzkashi. Buzkashi (lit. "goat pulling"), for those who don't know, is a game where a bunch of guys basically ride around between two poles fighting it out over a the stuffed carcase of a goat or calf. Called by different names it is an old steppe nomadic sport played in Afghanistan, Central Asia and Mongolia.

I won't give the plot away, but suffice it to say this movie has lots of cool footage of an actual bushkazi match, or at least it seems real. There is also a lot of footage of Kabul back around 1970 or so. And be warned there is lots of footage of animals fighting: camels, rams, and sparrows. That's right, people do bet on sparrow fights.

A major theme in the movie is the juxtaposition of Modernity with the ancient cultures of the "East." Yeah, kind of hokey like that. Keep an eye out for an extremely understated, but funny scene involving an airplane that sums up this uneasy coexistance beautifully. I'm not sure if Director Frankenheimer intended it that way, but it is pure genius.

The movie is at its weakest when trying to talk about the corruptibility of human nature and relationships between men. Uraz's servant and companion, Mukhi is slowly corrupted by Uraz, who corrupts Mukhi because he wants to add danger to his journey so he can show his daddy up. And let's face it, Uraz is a jerk; cold-blooded as Rick James would say. Once again, I'm not giving the plot away.

As the cover indicates, there is a girl in the movie. Leigh Taylor-Young plays Zareh, a girl of low caste who is loved by Uraz and his less-than faithful sidekick Mukhi. She is a schemer, driven to being evil by the hardness of the world. I was never sure if the noverl or the movie were misogynist in an old school James Michener, Scotch-on-the-rocks, and turn up the Sinatra kind of way, or whether it was a satire.

Oh, and yeah, there was a lovely horse that everyone was in love with. Eat your shorts Flika!

For those who love the movie, read the book by Joseph Kessel that it is based on. You can even read it in the original French if you are feeling pretentious! Make sure to tell your friends, though, and leave the book in a conspicious place and talk about how so much is lost in the translation.

The novel will explain a lot that the movie does not. For starters, Uraz and Tursun are Uzbeks from the North of Afghanistan. The "four provinces" and a couple of cities are mentioned in the movie, but if you ain't up on your Afghan geography the names will be meaningless. Also the movie makes it seem that Buzkashi is a traditional national sport for all Afghans. Wrong! As the book indicates, circa 1970, Bushkazi was still basically an Uzbek/Turkmen sport. Tursun and Uraz are Uzbeks. The cultural dichotomy between the Pashto and Dari speaking mountaineers and the Turkic peoples of the North is a big part of the novel. Kessel, like many other Westerners, was mystified by all those exotic folks, and spends a considerable amount of time describing them. On that note, the language used in the movie and the novel are kind of Edwardian, I guess because Kessel was trying to capture some of the floweriness of the original Dari.

Big disappointment that they left out the Nuristani storyteller character from the book. I repeat, if you liked the movie, you'll love the book.

Finally, I'm surprised Yul Brenner didn't have a role in this movie, considering he was in just about every flick prior to 1975 that required someone of indeterminate ethnicity.

Run with the Horsemen (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series)
$15.00
This book and the two sequels to it sustained our whole family while my grandchild was in the ICU on life support. We all read them as we sat with her around the clock. I love Porter Osborne

Crossing Over
$19.97
Harrison Ford in another excellent role, showing his versatility as an all around actor of the highest caliber.