"Why don't you just go...amuse yourself with a fly swatter or something."

It's baffling to think how this movie got made. Did no one read the script closely enough to figure out it didn't make any sense? The script is unintentionally hilarious, for one conversation after another take the form of allegedly witty banter, in which the characters appear to be reading between each other's lines and responding with metaphors and double meanings. The trouble is, none of the flowery language actually makes sense on any level. But the characters never quite realize they're talking nonsense, so their exchanges fly blissfully off the rails and into some surreal cosmos where logic fears to tread.

"Not just anybody! ... SOMEBODY!"

The storytelling is similarly laden with strange tangents. There's a scene in the film, for example, where a girl sets a film canister down next to a similarly-looking film canister. There's a close-up shot of this, so we know intuitively that the film canisters will be mixed up. And indeed, when the girl leaves, she grabs the wrong canister by mistake. What terrible repercussions will this have on our story? None, apparently. The film canisters are never seen or mentioned again.

Obviously the film was made for horse-lovers and is targeting the audiences that flocked to Flicka and Seabiscuit. But it is not very knowledgeable about that world. One of the pivotal plot points of the movie is when one of the girls -- the one that grew up around horses, mind you -- learns from a book that horses like carrots. Imagine that.