If you only prayed to the movie gods for two things last year — no more Chipmunks squeakquels and no more spoofs on that “I’m the King of the World” scene from James Cameron’s Titanic — I have some devastating news. God is smiting you by incorporating both of those things in the upcoming Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked film. Here’s a taste of the trailers that will be haunting every theater-going experience for you between now and Christmas.
The formidable subject of Buck shares his initials and ideals with another, even more imposing romantic hero. Black Beauty, a horse with a human range of intellect and emotion, is the title character and narrator of Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel. His life story is marked by hardship and hard work, all of it at the mercy of morally variable owners. Sewell wanted her readers in horse-dependent 19th-century England to see their mounts, carriage-pullers, and field-plowers not as insensible beasts but creatures worthy of respect and compassion. Buck Brannaman, a Wyoming horse trainer with a resume that includes inspiring the Nicholas Evans novel that became Robert Redford’s 1998 movie The Horse Whisperer , is the 21st-century embodiment of that same cause.
