Review: Wiener-Dog (2016)

Let me tell you about 2 of my favourite things. Number 1: Dogs. All dogs, to be perfectly honest. I’m the type of person who, whilst walking in the woods will say hello to every dog I meet, and completely ignore the human being on the other side of the lead. Dachshund’s in particular are extremely cute. Number 2: Those movies about multiple stories where they all end up linking together in some way. Okay, what I actually mean is that I love Love Actually, but you get the picture. So when I find out about a movie called Wiener-Dog, a movie about a little dachshund who changes the lives of a whole bunch of people, I’m hyped.

How then, can a movie let me down so badly?! Here, let me find you this movie’s description, straight from IMDB: A dachshund passes from oddball owner to oddball owner, whose radically dysfunctional lives are all impacted by the pooch.

Hmm, not quite. Let me give it a go: The unluckiest dachshund in the world gets passed on from one bad owner to the next, people who don’t deserve the bundle of happiness that is Wiener-Dog.

Perhaps I’m being harsh. Let me recap on the ‘oddball owners’ that Wiener-Dog gets passed on to.

Oddball Owners #1: A father picks up Wiener-Dog from the local shelter as a gift for his cancer-suffering child. Proceeds to keep her locked in a cage until ‘her will has been broken’. Parents leave said child alone in the house whilst they attend a yoga class, and the kid feeds the hungry little dog far too many granola bars, causing mass diarrhea. Father takes Wiener-Dog to the vets to be put down.

At this point the viewers are treated to a beautiful tracking shot of diarrhea in the street. It goes on for ages, and it’s accompanied by some lovely music, too. 

Oddball Owners #2: The vet’s assistant (Greta Gerwig) takes pity on Wiener-Dog, and steals her away. She names her doodie. As in, well, poo. Great. She then decides to take a road trip with an old school friend who is possibly the world’s biggest douchebag, and leaves Wiener-Dog with her friend’s disabled family.

I’m not sure what happens at this point, because we head straight on to…

Oddball Owners #4: A struggling scriptwriter (Danny DeVito) now owns Wiener-Dog, but instead of giving her a loving home, he has a crazy turn and straps a bomb to her. I’m not even kidding. The bomb squad have to disarm her before she goes boom.

Oddball Owners #?: Wiener-Dog now lives with an old, blind lady, who has named her Cancer. Wonderful. Old lady’s horrible granddaughter comes to visit with her new boyfriend Fantasy (arghhh!) and asks for $10,000 to help him with his artistic dream. She relents, and terrible granddaughter leaves. What happens next is some bizarre epiphany involving multiple versions of old lady’s younger self.

I won’t spoil the ending for you. Even though this post should ensure that you’ll never want to see this movie, I won’t do that to you. It will go down in history as one of the biggest ‘WTF’ endings. 

From what I can gather, Wiener-Dog got a lot of good reviews. Perhaps the story is just too spiritual or artsy for me, but all it did was turn me into a giant ball of rage. At least I wasn’t bored at any point. 

Review: Frances Ha (2012)

It’s a fun time, when an obsession hits me. Every now and again an intense feeling hits me over a particular actor or actress, and I feel the need the spend the following weeks consuming their entire filmography. What follows is normally hours of watching sub-par rom coms and dramas that make no sense to me, but every now and again I come across a real gem, a movie that makes me forget why I watched it in the first place. That happened to me the other night with Frances Ha (2012).

It’s an indie movie following a girl living in New York called Frances (Greta Gerwig). She lives in an apartment with her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and the two are closer than sisters, and life seems great, but Frances ends up separating from her boyfriend when he asks her to move in with him, and Frances is reluctant to leave Sophie on her own. What makes things worse is not long after, Sophie moves out to live with her boyfriend, and that’s where things really go downhill.

After she is forced to move out, Frances moves into a lush apartment inhabited by rich boys Lev (Adam Driver), who brings home a different girl every night, and Dan (Michael Esper), who she has a playful friendship with, with Dan picking up on all the quirky things she does and labels ‘undateable’, but with affection. It reminded me of when I was younger, and that’s how I envisaged my life panning out, living in a huge apartment with my friends. I mean, that’s not even a thing here in the UK, but regardless, the movie shows the downsides to this, too.

To be completely honest, it took weeks to eventually see this. I even considered not watching it at all, and for a silly reason to. It’s all black and white! An odd choice for a modern movie but I read that director Baumbach did it to instill a feeling of nostalgia. Being the same age as Frances, I can’t see it that way, but what I did find that without colour, I was fully focused on everything that the characters were doing and saying, and it held my attention more than most movies do now. Weird! I clearly have a much shorter attention span than I thought I did.

Frances goes through a lot in this movie, but essentially, it’s about break-up and change. Not a break-up in the traditional sense either, but a best-friendship break-up. It’s quite heartbreaking to watch, and although I couldn’t relate at every moment, I could definitely see parts of myself in Frances. Especially in the scene around the dinner table. I honestly feel so lost in group conversations sometimes.

I haven’t mentioned the soundtrack yet, either! It’s not something I normally even pick up on, but some of the songs in this had me dancing in my seat with a smile on my face. And finally, it isn’t until the very final scene that we learn why the movie is called Frances Ha. It’s such a minor thing, but it’s a detail I really appreciated.

After watching, I’d decided to give this an 8/10, but now I’ve written this review, I feel like I enjoyed it more than that...I don’t know. This is a placeholder score for now!