+ Most Under-Appreciated Movie of the Year + Best Dramedy of the Year + Best Dog Movie of the Year
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| A wiener-dog's butt features prominently on this pastel-colored poster for Todd Solodz's Wiener-Dog |
We follow a wiener-dog, who incurs a nervous stomach from living with an overly modern, clean family and gets rescued from a lethal injection by a young woman, Dawn Wiener, who eventually gives it away to a couple who both have Downs syndrome. After a short break, the film moves to screenwriting teacher Dave Schmerz in New York, who also owns a wiener-dog. The last story concerns an old, untalkative woman, who has named her wiener-dog Cancer.
Master writer-director Todd Solondz (Happiness (1998)) returns with something worthwhile here after years of works of lesser quality (Palindromes (2004), Life During Wartime (2009) and his most negligible effort to date, Dark Horse (2011)). Wiener-Dog is a darkly funny, cinematic salute to peculiarly shaped, sausage-like wiener-dogs everywhere.
As usual, Solondz satirizes and spikes his country and its unintelligent, superficial, indifferent, greedy, selfish and joyless populace, (as seen from Solondz's perspective.) Here he does so with a strong cast of Tracy Letts (The Lovers (2017)), Julie Delpy (Sunny Side Up (1994)), Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha (2012)), Kieran Culkin (The Cider House Rules (1999)), Zosia Mamet (Bleeding Heart (2015)) and Ellen Burstyn (The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2004, TV movie)) all giving sound, fine performances. Also good are Keaton Nigel Cooke (American Masters (2016, TV documentary) as the boy of the first family, Connor Long (Actor Martinez (2016)) and Bridget Brown (LOL (2012)) as the lovely couple with Downs and Danny DeVito (Drowning Mona (2000)), who is a standout as Dave Schmerz, a man who gets ridiculed and shoved towards early retirement along with his priceless 'what-if; then-what' teaching dogma.
Wiener-Dog also has a wonderful country song about its title animal, (The Ballad of Wiener-Dog, sung by Eric Morris (Blue Bloods (2011-12, actor)), lyrics by Marc Shaiman (Hairspray (2007, composer)) and Scott Wittman (Smash (2012, TV-series, composer)). It is an acidic, harsh gumball of a dramedy, constructed by Solondz at his most hostile towards modern Western society, which he derides as if from a great distance. His hostility towards the way the modern world and its people function, as he sees it and them, is quite unique. The characters throughout Wiener-Dog are fairly well drawn, and I would have followed them for longer. For a film about a notoriously elongated dog also known as a dachshund, Wiener-Dog, regrettably, is a bit short.
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Watch a trailer for the film here
Cost: Unknown
Box office: 726k $
= Uncertain (but most likely a huge flop)
[Wiener-Dog premiered 22 January (Sundance) and runs 88 minutes. The film ties to Solondz's second film, the great Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) in that it reconnects us to the lead character of that film, Dawn Wiener, who is now portrayed by Gerwig, (original star Heather Matarazzo declined to star in Wiener-Dog.) The story is intended to be about one dachshund's journey from owner to owner, although I didn't realize this during watching it. Filming took place in 30 days from June - July 2015 in New York on an undisclosed but low budget. Brie Larson filmed a scene for the film, which was cut out. At the film's Sundance premiere, some audiences booed and walked out SPOILER by the film's end, in which the wiener-dog suffers a violent death. Some of these 'animal lovers' also subsequently attempted to spoil the film online, proving, perhaps, that Sundance can also be a ridiculous venue for opening a film. Amazon bought the distribution rights for the film for an undisclosed 7-figure sum. It opened #44 to a 24k $ first weekend in 2 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #34 and in 73 theaters (different weeks) and grossed 470k $ (64.7 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were France with 112k $ (15.4 %) and Russia with 111k $ (15.3 %). Only 5 foreign markets have their grosses made public; the film had a few more, but they may have had too insignificant grosses to be posted. If assumed made a a very small 1 mil. $ budget, the film would count as a huge flop. Solondz is in pre-production with his next film, Love Child (2018) starring Penélope Cruz and Edgar Ramirez. Wiener-Dog is certified fresh at 77 % with a 6.7/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Wiener-Dog?
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