Miscellaneous Movie Recommendations

Dante's Inferno (2007)

Oddball animated version with little paper cutouts. This was actually very good for someone who knows and loves the original, because then you get all the references. Good sense of humor. Very left-leaning in whom it assigns to hell (Bushies figure prominently, as do Christians). But at the same time - look at how it handles some embarrassing parts of Dante from a modern perspective. It doesn't remove or skip homosexuals, but it has them there mostly for what seems to be hypocrisy (most of the men listed were closeted and guilty of quite other bad behavior - e.g. Ernst Rohm), and their only punishment seems to only be to dance to bad music - FOREVER! (Again, the movie has a naughty but not vicious or cruel sense of humor.) I would think for someone who's never read the original, the experience overall would be more "huh?"

Seabiscuit (2003)

Too many short scenes early on, cutting to things that don't really make sense (bull fight, boxing, dismantling car, riding train) and have no dialogue. The Depression era newsreel updates and voiceovers were annoying, but overall it worked as a parable for Depression era, up-by-your-bootstraps hope, w/o sinking into total sentimentality - not everything works out as it would if the whole thing were scripted and Disney-esque, which I appreciated.