Wind Dancer

This movie is so bad. It has no acting what so ever. The story is about a girl who does rodeo tournaments and becomes sick then learns to teach and help children through working with animals. `Rain Man' without Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. That equals no story worth wasting time watching.

It's an inspiring story, and the acting is good. However, it promotes bad stereotypes about people with disabilities that they aren't trying hard enough and that it's mostly emotional baggage. All the therapist in the story does to push the girl to do everything on her own and is mean about it. She then goes above the parent in all areas and seems to be some kind of child expert. Also, there are negative comments about being single and that it's automatically "lonely" even though the woman clearly has a calling to work with children who need help and finds it fulfilling. It IS good family entertainment.

Now this movie was ok, considering it had a beautiful horse (Lacy) that played Wind Dancer. But I just have one complaint. They kept switching the horse's gender back and forth. First she was a filly, then it was "Good boy!" And I seem to recall at one time during the movie, a character said "She's been this way ever since she was a COLT." Well, anyway, it was a good movie except for that. The horses are beautiful!

This message movie that plays like a "Very Special 'Blossom'" is suitable kiddie fare for parents who want to inspire some spunk in their Nintendo DS-obsessed kids, but grownups will really only appreciate it for the performance of Brian Keith, who plays the good-hearted curmudgeon role he built his career on.

To sum up, a remarkably Blossom-looking teen ends up in a wheelchair after taking a bad spill off her horse, so her dad brings her and a kid shrink to Keith's ranch, where she predictably becomes attached to a palomino named Wind Dancer.

While faux-Blossom's relationship with Wind Dancer helps her heal, some conniving horse thieves – played more broadly and terribly than Jason Alexander and Renee Russo did "Boris and Natasha" – have their own plans for the horse.

Faux-Blossom is a good little actress, and it's sad what happened to her later in life (Google it). It's also sad what happened to Brian Keith a couple years later (Google that, too), but his fans know that and are happy he left understated little performances like this in his legacy.

Regardless, "Wind Dancer" is cut from the same cloth as a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" flick, and those are always good for a Family Movie Night, for those of you who use DVDs to spark poignant family discussion instead of a tool to leave the kids drooling in front of SpongeBob while you do whatever it is you consider more important than spending time with your kids.

"Wind Dancer" is part of a 15-movie set from Echo Bridge that costs a fin at K-Mart, and it's a standout on a DVD that's not worth much more than that. I recommend buying it, especially because that set also includes the sweet Africa-set movie "Askari," which hearkens back to Disney's early 1970s live-action films, and is worth all five bucks on its own.

Don't go Netflixing "Wind Dancer" otherwise, unless you have kids for whom you're looking to teach a Very Valuable Lesson that you don't have the parenting skills to teach without a movie nobody's ever heard of.

But if you do decide to talk to your kids about "Wind Dancer," I recommend including the life story of the lead actress as a cautionary tale.

This is an excellent movie to watch, because it is about a family,the daughter gets hurt. They go to a ranch,where the girl gets help by learning to do things on her own,without help. She takes care of a horse,and they decided to help other kids to be independent.