It was a slow weekend so I decided to catch up on my dog movies. I rented the top four released in the last year and officially kicked off the first annual “Cannes-9 Film Festival.” I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, to tell you the truth, but I hoped for the best.
First off was “Hotel for Dogs.” The premise: What if you found an abandoned hotel and your little brother was an inventive genius that could rig up a contraption that made the dogs that lived there deposit all their droppings in kind of a doo-doo-dumb-waiter-to-the-dumpster so you didn’t have to clean up after them, allowing you to cruise the city and adopt every stray you found and bring it back to the far-out little theme park for dogs you’ve created. My favorite homemade “attraction” was a car door the dogs could lean their heads out of while being blown by a fan as they watched a movie shot of an open road and bobbed their heads up and down to “Born to Be Wild.” You get the idea. One sight gag after another playing off pooch-oid stereotypes. Your basic dogsploitation movie. One part cute to three parts contrived. Next…
… “Beverley Hills Chihuahua.” Premise: Super-pampered lap dog falls into the hands of irresponsible dog-sitter and ends up in Tijuana, where she’s dog-napped. But wait – an ex-police dog helps her escape! But (uh-oh) now she’s being dogged by her dognapper’s vicious Doberman. Thrills, spills and yuks for the whole family.
Whereas “Hotel For Dogs” is a cartoon masquerading as a live-action movie, BHC throws in a carload of computer animation along with the live action, mostly to make the hounds’ mouths move when they “talk” to each other and to give their faces expression as they do so. Every lift of the eyebrow and every pained look so perfectly conveys the emotions of the scene, you’d swear they were really delivering the dialogue.
I suddenly realized that Arnold Schwartzenegger missed a bet in his acting career. Instead of using CGI to make his face look like it was part cyborg, the tech crew should have used it to make it look like he could actually act. They could have tweaked a little nuance into his Mt. Rushmore-like visage.
The next feature in the fest was “Bolt,” a no-bones-about-it, honest-to-goodness cartoon. State-of-the-art animation, no less. Premise: The protagonist pooch, who stars in his own TV series, is kept in a “bubble” by his director so he won’t know that he doesn’t really possess the super powers his TV persona displays. The humans in charge think Bolt will deliver the role with more conviction if he really believes he is a super-hound. (Sounds like a few ex-presidents I could name.) When he escapes and slowly realizes his true (humble) identity, Bolt has to be taught to behave like an ordinary flesh-and-bones dog… by, ironically, a cat. Charming conceit. I won’t say too much about this flick, except that it won the Paw D’Or at my own personal “Cannes-9” Film Festival. Well-written, well-made.
The last movie on the ticket was “Marley and Me.” Premise: Newspaper writer scrupulously avoids training his dog so he will always have plenty of slapstick material to put in his column, eventually making him rich and famous. Okay, that’s more like the subtext. The main premise is Man has dog, and wife, and a number of children, gets raises, moves to bigger and bigger houses. One sad day dog dies. That’s it – not exactly “The Maltese Falcon.”
I don’t mind “slice-of-life,” just as long as it’s got a bit more flavor than a $5 pizza from Little Caesar’s (little seizures?). Near the end – when the on-screen family gathers at Marley’s open grave, dropping their poems and drawings into the hole, and Wilson’s character exclaims to a daughter, in his most patronizing sing-song: “Wow! That’s a really great picture, honey!” – clearly he isn’t talking about “Marley & Me,” the movie.
It’s not surprising that the cartoon was the pick of the litter. Animated filmmakers take their medium pretty seriously these days. Dog movie makers? Not so much. They still think their subject has to be silly or saccharine to sell.
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