- Your partner has gone on a rare and deserved men's night out.
- You neglected to procure video entertainment for yourself before he left, and now are unable to do so because of the sleeping baby in your care.
- You have (temporarily) exhausted the charms of the internet, and besides, your laptop is making your lap sweat, something you DON'T need in addition to this bloody heatwave. (Speaking of which... hello, weather? Satan called. He's sorry you two fought, but he really wants to patch things up, so you should RETURN TO HELL IMMEDIATELY.)
- And your book (whose name I don't want to give away, but let's just say it rhymes with "Grapes of Math") is a bit of a downer, so you need to take a break.
If you haven't seen Must Love Dogs, here's what you must do to approximate the experience:
Go find a carpenter's level. Place the level on a table. Bolster the table's legs with sugar packets, old handbills, matchbooks, and grains of sand until the level indicates that the table is precisely even. This will help give you an appreciation of the utter flatness of Must Love Dogs. Scientists could calibrate their instruments on this movie.
It's not just that the performances were wooden... or that I was forced to watch John Cusack once again dredge up his wounded "Lloyd Dobler ten/fifteen/twenty years later" schtick... or that even the DOGS weren't convincing in their roles... or that the fabulous Stockard Channing is relegated to a dead-end role in which her secondary character arrives at a moment of semi-crisis, WHICH IS NEVER RESOLVED... or that I'm expected to believe that the original Actor of Wood, Dermot Mulroney, has a freakin' PhD in history... or that the requisite pair of gay friends' only function in the movie is to take Diane Lane out for, I shit you not, a midnight manicure... or that the entire movie is built around the irritating premise that the main characters must pair up as quickly as possible or else they've failed as humans... and for the love of all that's holy, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?
Or maybe it is those things after all.
Must love dogs. If you like this movie, you'd have to.
12 comments:
More reasons not to see this movie, ever.
I didn't even know they had Captain Von Trapp in there. Woe.
Ms. Lane is a right piece of work anyways, so I stopped caring after she helped to butcher Under the Tuscan Sun. She was terribly rude to a my aunt.
Ok, the dogs were cute, particularly the Wesite Cusack's character was babysitting.
But the rest of the movie was terrible. It may be time to do an intervention with Mr. Cusack, or at least his agent....
beth, Cusack definitely needs an intervention. He had been falling off my secret-boyfriend list for a while (beginning with the Neve Campbell betrayal), and Must Love Dogs sent him catipulting into "what was I thinking" territory. The jet-black hair at 40 smacks of narcissism - I suspect there is some serious (and prolly attractive) grey under the Just For Men. And, like Dopp said, the "I'm so sensitive, I really want a relationship, but I'm also kind of an asshole deep down" schtick is getting old, both on screen and in real life.
Oh, and when Diane Lane jumped in the river and swam to him, I wanted to throw my cup at the screen.
I actually couldn't sleep after watching this movie asking several questions...
Why would anyone agree to be in this movie after reading the script? Who cast Cusack's best friend - he was absolutely awful? Could it have been edited better? Maybe the director was just bad?
I really was tortured by how such a bad plot/script would even get through the process. The ending almost made me want to never see anything with either lead ever again and I love Cusack.
Who greenlights this dreck?
I'm always facinated by terrible movies involving decent actors. There are just so many people involved in putting a production of that size together (on both sides of the camera), that I find it hard to believe none of them ever said, "Everybody, hold on! It has come to my attention that this thing we're working on is very, very bad. We're talking Gigli bad. Please let me know if we can fix this, because if not I think we should all kill ourselves."
We turned it off after 15 minutes. Staring at the floor is better than watching that movie.
I have nothing new to add to the discussion, since we all seem to be in agreement here. I did want to say, however, that I'm kicking myself for not using this much better title for this post: "All Doggy, No Style."
I hate myself when this happens. I really do.
I thought Keanu was the Actor of Wood. Has he been superceded?
LOL I just saw thsi movie a few days ago. My friend bought it and was eager to share the misery. (She buys movies without watching and this movie purchase is a primse example of why not to engage in such risky behavior)... it was miserable. I reviewed it in my movie reviews but its not nearly as on point as yours was! lol.
This was on the other day and I couldn't find anything else. My husband said, "Didn't we see this already and yes that means I don't want to watch it again."
In my defense, sometimes I get stressed out and actually have to watch a mind numbingly dumb movie so that I can put the veg in vegitate.
Oh yes - what utter tripe it was! For me the ONLY saving grace was John Cusack doing his Lloyd impression - because it had at least SOME entertainment value. I also thought that someone was kidding themselves in trying to make out that Ms Lane was only in her early thirties in this film. Utter pointless pap with no redeeming value.
I hope it's also acceptable to have watched the film while donating platelets at the Red Cross. My Netflix DVD was busted so I had to chose from their selection.
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