at the movies

What was on TV? Sat, Jan 22, 2005

Racing Stripes and the death of family movies. Plus Paul Giamatti hosts SNL

Grace MacLaine

22 Jan 2025 — 3 min read

20 years ago, Paul Giamatti was a lock for an Oscar nomination for Sideways. Except surprise! Not really. Now let's go to the movies.

At the Movies: Racing Stripes

People are always mourning the death of the mid-budget drama. The R-rated comedy. The rom-com. The erotic thriller. You know what I mourn? The live-action family film.

Racing Stripes is a talking animal movie about a zebra who enters a horse race. You can easily imagine the CGI animated version of this movie. And it's worse! Racing Stripes is no masterpiece. It's 2.5 stars on a good day. But it's shot on film, it stars Bruce Greenwood, it looks nice, and it hits all the sports movie beats (Frankie Muniz the zebra falls in love with Mandy Moore the white stallion!). Movies like this foster a love of film in a way that I'm not sure CGI-animated movies do.

And it used to be even better! This movie marks the end of the brief era of Frankie Muniz, kinda-sorta-movie star. In the early aughts, Muniz was starring in a movie every year: Big Fat Liar, two Agent Cody Banks movies, and this one (all while filming 22 episodes of a sitcom a year, the poor boy must have been exhausted). So kids and tweens could watch sports movies, spy movies, and crime comedy-thrillers (seriously, the crime literature website CrimeReads published a golwing review of Big Fat Liar last year). Now they graduate straight from CGI animated movies for small children to superhero movies and blockbusters. We're all poorer for it.

Racing stripes made $8 million dollars this weekend (its second in theaters). It ultimately made $50 million domestic.

Also at the Movies

Another family comedy bested Racing Stripes as the box office. Ice Cube vehicle Are We There Yet was number one, it ultimately made $82 million.
The Assault on Precinct 13 remake starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, and John Leguizamo expanded into wide release and flopped.

11:30 SNL on NBC

Host Paul Giamatti with musical guest Ludacris featuring Sum41

People forget, but Paul Giamatti was a real nobody (complimentary) before Sideways. Then all of the sudden this schlubby character actor was in the middle of an awards campaign and he was kind of...famous. It's always fun seeing Paul Giamatti during this awards campaign because you can tell he's still shocked by this development. The campaign wasn't even successful (he was infamously snubbed for Sideways) but he went from nobody to SNL host in about four months. That's pretty amazing.

The best sketch of the night makes the most of this story. Giamatti plays himself in the back of the taxi post-Globes. The driver is pumped about Jamie Foxx's win, and Paul Giamatti was born to play the role of "guy resigned to losing all awards season." Giamatti tries to get this guy to remember who he is, or remember him in any movie he's done. It all ends with him pretending to be Rob Schneider. It's great. See? One day you're a nobody, then you lose at the Golden Globes, and almost 20 years later you win a Golden Globe, celebrate at In-n-Out, and become a meme. Sometimes the universe is fun.