Wild Horse, Wild Ride

So, here's the premise: Every year the government rounds up hundreds of horses, and the Mustang Heritage Foundation (I think) throws what it calls the Extreme Mustang Makeover, where people adopt the horses for ninety days, during which time they must thoroughly break them. At the end of the three months, they all get together and compete to see which horse is the best behaved.

Then all the horses are auctioned off to glue factories.

Wait, what?

No, I've never made any bones about my mistrust of horses. However, I've known and loved some horse people so I'll keep my glue and dog food comments to a minimum.

Basically, this is a movie in the style of a reality show, only instead of people, it's horses. Well, horses and people. Horses and horse people. Horses and their people have interesting relationships with each other, which this movie explores.

Here we have some old guys and some young guys and a coupla sassy chicks, struggling with their horses over the time period—although the struggles are very different one to the next. The old Indian guy can barely get on his horse in time, whereas the sassy cowgirl breaks hers—we don't even see it—in three days.

This is an emotional time, at least for the humans. The horses...well, who knows? They'd eat you if they had sharp enough teeth.

Predictably, a great many of the humans fall in love with their horses by the end of the training period. Also predictably, the ones who had the greatest difficulties have the hardest time parting with them. And also predictably, the ones who seem to have the least emotional attachment are the ones who are the most successful.

Predictability aside, it's a good movie. It's a nice predictability that tells you good things about people. You kinda like these folks, mostly (the sassy cowgirl kinda annoyed me) and there's just miles more competence and ability in them than in, say, a trashy "let's be famous for acting badly" reality show.

And even an ol' horse hater like myself couldn't help but be a little bit moved.

The Boy also liked it, though he allowed as there was an awful lotta horse training. He thought it dragged a bit in the middle till it got to the competition. I don't think he has any opinions on horses, but he's certainly less sentimental than his old man.