I finally saw A Dog's Breakfast.

[icarus]

I finally saw A Dog's Breakfast.

Anybody wanna buy a DVD? Only partially used?

Yes, that's right. About halfway through the movie wildernessguru started complaining, "This is really bad."

I said, "Wait. Hang on. People have said it's funny."

Ten minutes later... "This is really bad."

"I'm bored," I admitted. And cringed, trying to explain. "I find have no sympathy for these characters."

He said, generously, "Every actor is in a bad movie from time to time. He [David Hewlett] was really good in serious movies. Like that one where he was in a tree."

"Treed Murray."

"Yeah. That was great." (He doesn't know ADB was written and directed by DH.)

I said, not as generously given DH wrote this, "The writing was better in that one. Here, the characters have been written deliberately weird, and I find I don't care about any of them."

We got as far as the scene where the DH's character was in the basement, chastising the dog. Then we clicked it off.

I thought the camera work was self-conscious but good (my favorite shot was how it kept returning to that ugly brown house -- I don't know why that cracked me up). Definitely this movie is a director's "toy."

The acting was okay, not brilliant, definitely a bunch of people throwing something together on their weekend and not trying hard. DH oversells his role. Paul McGillion was okay, I couldn't see much difference between his role here and Doctor Beckett. Kate I really liked, she played it lightly but there was a richness to her delivery that was just a little bit serious, like she was weary of her brother's antics. But then the script was just mean to DH's character, cutting away any empathy I'd have for any of them.

The score was professional, well-timed, not overbearing, fit the subject well -- the sound mixing expert.

The problem is the script. It's very common to make one of three mistakes in ones first original character "creations":

1) A Mary Sue, self-insert.
2) A bland Everyman.
3) A character overloaded with quirks (usually done to avoid the first two).

David went through door number three.

The pacing in the beginning was slow, wallowing in the main character's OCD. Without a spoiler or two you didn't get a feeling for where the story was headed until late. There wasn't a good hook. The dialogue had snap and all the actors had good comic timing. But it kept coming back to, wow, I don't care about these people. I keep feeling like we needed some explanation of what was going on with DH's character, or we needed to start somewhere we could empathize -- like with Kate, chivvying her fiance out the door, trying to explain her brother and not being able to.

Then, the plot, well. I'll finish the movie sometime before I make a final statement about the plot. But as far as I got, I kept thinking, "I've seen this before. This is a live action version of a Road Runner cartoon and DH's character is Wile E. Coyote -- with less arrogance and more mental disorders."

wildernessguru's summation is simpler. "It was stupid. DH was constantly sweating and running around like a chicken with its head cut off, taking everything seriously. It's been done to death. A joint and being half-drunk wouldn't make it funny."

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Love your icon.

I watched the rest, and I enjoyed the way he framed shots, how the action occurs off and blurry in the corners, returning to the tight shot of that ugly brown house.

The acting later gets weaker. Kate surprised me. When she was outside with the music blasting she played a completely different character, much more bubble-headed and flighty than how she played it through the rest of the movie.

The writing... that's where it's bad. The actors could deal with the trite dialogue and make it sound deliberate. But the character-building was weak. Halfway through there's a scene that attempts to make up for the fact that DH's character is not appealing, a patch where we're told (not shown) that the main character used to walk his sister home -- it seems someone pointed out we're given no reason to like him, but this is too little, too late. No such patch is attempted for the other characters, so we never have any reason to care about them. By the end, they're just foils to the main character.

The suspense -- once we have a dead body -- carries, and it is amusing to watch DH fight to find a way to get rid of the body, wondering if its not all a figment of his neurosis. But the resolution makes no emotional sense. All is sunshine and flowers-?

What I enjoyed was watching the overt sexual interaction between Hewlett and McGillion. Jeeze. If had no other information I would say those two are both queer and involved with each other.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

It felt a lot like fanfic about Meredith, Jeannie and Carson at some point.

Resolution also makes no intellectual sense. Did the dog eat the plastic doll? Etc. etc. no I don't really wanna know *g*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Did the dog eat the plastic doll?

I think that was covered when she went to the store during the day. Apparently she bought a lot of meat. But the happy ending where everything was resolved? No, I didn't buy it.

Icarus