So, it’s the school year again.
There’s no use denying it; the start of classes is as inevitable as Comedy Central picking up “Vampires Suck” in six months and then playing it bookended with “Just Friends” and “Van Wilder: Freshman Year” every weekend until the London Olympics.
But cheer up! If three consecutive showings of “American Pie Presents: Beta House,” aren’t enough to make you give up movies forever, all you have to do is grab Tuesday’s Badger Herald, run to Four Star, and make your choice. This column compares two recent DVD releases by examining one particular aspect of their production, plot, direction, or acting. Out last week: “Harry Brown” and “Marmaduke.
If it’s a choice between those Sunday afternoon television movies and “Marmaduke,” you might as well save yourself the walk. Based loosely on the syndicated newspaper comic strip of the same name, “Marmaduke” follows the titular Great Dane (Owen Wilson, “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) and his human family through the trials of a move from the Midwest to Southern California. The writers apparently decided the best way to do that was to take the framework of an already once-chewed be-yourself-after-trying-to-fit-in teen-edy in the vein of “Mean Girls” or “She’s All That,” replace the high school archetypes with dogs, swallow, then regurgitate the entire thing into a sound stage where a small stable of famous actors voicing animals (George Lopez, Fergie, Kiefer Sutherland, and others) could use their paychecks as straws to lap the whole thing up.
There are, obviously, several problems with this. Dogs don’t have cliques. Dogs don’t need true love. Dogs don’t throw parties in their owners’ house when they leave for vacation, and if they did I very much doubt that the doggy version of a keg stand would involve a toilet bowl. Of course, “Marmaduke” was never meant to be taken seriously, so those aspects can easily be excused. What can’t be excused is the apparent attempt by director Tom Dey (“Failure to Launch”) to incorporate limiting facets of the comic strip medium into the flexible landscape of film.
For instance, in the September 5th Sunday Funnies, you can find Marmaduke enjoying a game of baseball with two children. The boy hits the baseball and yells for Marmaduke to “Go get it!” Marmaduke obliges, but decides not to bring the ball back.
And that’s the whole joke.
The punchline (“Well, to be fair, I did yell ‘Go get it!’ not retrieve.”) just makes things worse. There’s plenty of this brand of would-be physical humor in the movie version; I count it to the writers’ credit that there are only three instances where human characters unleash an overly-exasperated “Maaarmaaduuke!” after some mistake by the clumsy canine.
But in other areas even that restraint is missing. No one thought to clue in this movie’s creators to the peril of bad puns; conitunous quips like “This party is off the leash!” and “let’s get our bark on!” detract from its rare instances of near-humor like an extremely annoying mime blocking your view of an only slightly less annoying mime.
And worse, Dey dials up the lighting and contrast to a level seen only in, well, cartoons. It’s as if the camera was wearing polarized shades. Grass looks like it was watered for weeks, and then spray painted green for good measure. Clothes are uniformly bright – cotton candy pinks and canary yellows for girls, bright blues and bleached whites for guys. The Sunday morning palate somehow extends to night scenes as well. Evening confrontations between various dogs are invariably lit up by a set of floods or some unfortunate plot point involving car lights.
Of course, for newspapers a system that accepts only the five brightest colors and their immediate combinations saves money at the press. But for a movie, it seems rooted completely in laziness. Thankfully contrary to that lack of depth is a commitment to realism apparent in every shot in the moving and incendiary British film “Harry Brown.”
A compelling hybrid of “Trainspotting,” “Gran Torino,” and ” Dead Man’s Shoes,” “Harry Brown” is the tale of an elderly vigilante that confronts gang members in his neighborhood after losing his best friend and missing his late wife’s death to their ubiquitous violence. The reluctant ex-marine (Michael Caine, “Inception”) takes up arms only after he’s been backed into a corner, and even then he expresses regret that his lots have fallen in such unfortunate fashion.
It’s a film made with exquisite touch and extreme care. Director Daniel Barber (in his feature-length debut) makes a commitment early in the film to realistic lighting and punches that ticket all the way to the final frame. Unlike “Marmaduke,” the lighting here holds important and definable meaning. The grey-green-brown grass and the clouded, blurry sky signify that there’s something amiss with the bleak landscape under its surface appearance. Further, the utter lack of artificial light indicates Harry Brown’s unwavering discontent with his predicament right up to the scene in which he decides that he must become the master of his own fate.
Likewise, when a phone rings on a completely black screen – a screen only illuminated by Harry Brown once he turns on his bedside reading light – it serves to underscore the realism and up the emotional ante on this gritty and awesome survey of English gang life. “Harry Brown” is in nearly every sense the emotional, logical and narrative antithesis of the cartoonish drivel personified by the immense talking dog in “Marmaduke.” What results is a film far less idyllic but gigantically more watchable for the effort
Lin Weeks is a junior majoring in Finance and Marketing. Upset with his omission of the DVD you were most excited about renting this week? Vent at [email protected].
