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Surr-reel Cinema
Jan. 7th, 2011 08:58 pmWe watched A Dog Year tonight. This might be the first picture, ever, where I've actually met the characters portrayed by the two top-billed stars of the film, and is one of the relatively few where I read the original source material long before seeing the movie.
You should've seen this film months ago, if not a year or two ago; it was an HBO Films project that wound up in Post-Production Hell after Time Warner decided, sometime last year, that it would no longer try releasing material to the non-small screen. I've had this film Netflixed since even before meeting the inspirations of both Jon (its star) and Emma (the movie's, if not the book's, second-billed character). Making the experience all the more surreal, though, are the bindings to other characters played by the actors in those roles.
Jon's place is taken by Jeff Bridges, who's been in many other things of late but who, for us, will always be The Dude from The Big Lebowski; NT's historic Riviera Theater is running a special next weekend-with a screening of the Coen Brothers classic followed by a night of bowling down the road in Kenmore.
Meanwhile, my erstwhile fellow baseball blogger Emma is brought to the screen by my future second wife (once bigamy is legalized in this state), Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose. It's awesomely surreal seeing someone you've met, and quite like, being played by someone you've never met, and yet adore. "Emma"'s screen time was short, but appreciated, and even though the real Emma didn't have as big a role in the book as her brief appearance accounted for in the movie, I found myself smiling from here to HERE as I saw "her" onscreen.
I nearly cried at the loss of "Sweet Stanley," one of Emma's pre-existing Labs who surrendered to heart disease and/or hip dysplasia during the course of the film. I related to "Devon" as having been abused before Jon came to adopt him, remembering much of the same sadness when our first dog Tasha came to live with us ten years ago this month. (She spent most of the first half of the film mooching for Eleanor's homemade pizza, just as she mooches from us every night; the significance of the plot seemed lost on her, but not on us.) And I noted both the parallels and the slight inaccuracies in the later portions of the film being set in Jon's current haunts near Bedlam Corners, Noo Yawk, where HBO spent thousands on thousands of dollars replacing venues on his farm but didn't bother to spend the couple hundred bucks to put accurate New Jersey plates on cars in his "old neighborhood."
Nitpicks notwithstanding, I highly recommend both the film, and Jon's underlying works, to any of you who love the "morons" of the four-legged set.
You should've seen this film months ago, if not a year or two ago; it was an HBO Films project that wound up in Post-Production Hell after Time Warner decided, sometime last year, that it would no longer try releasing material to the non-small screen. I've had this film Netflixed since even before meeting the inspirations of both Jon (its star) and Emma (the movie's, if not the book's, second-billed character). Making the experience all the more surreal, though, are the bindings to other characters played by the actors in those roles.
Jon's place is taken by Jeff Bridges, who's been in many other things of late but who, for us, will always be The Dude from The Big Lebowski; NT's historic Riviera Theater is running a special next weekend-with a screening of the Coen Brothers classic followed by a night of bowling down the road in Kenmore.
Meanwhile, my erstwhile fellow baseball blogger Emma is brought to the screen by my future second wife (once bigamy is legalized in this state), Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose. It's awesomely surreal seeing someone you've met, and quite like, being played by someone you've never met, and yet adore. "Emma"'s screen time was short, but appreciated, and even though the real Emma didn't have as big a role in the book as her brief appearance accounted for in the movie, I found myself smiling from here to HERE as I saw "her" onscreen.
I nearly cried at the loss of "Sweet Stanley," one of Emma's pre-existing Labs who surrendered to heart disease and/or hip dysplasia during the course of the film. I related to "Devon" as having been abused before Jon came to adopt him, remembering much of the same sadness when our first dog Tasha came to live with us ten years ago this month. (She spent most of the first half of the film mooching for Eleanor's homemade pizza, just as she mooches from us every night; the significance of the plot seemed lost on her, but not on us.) And I noted both the parallels and the slight inaccuracies in the later portions of the film being set in Jon's current haunts near Bedlam Corners, Noo Yawk, where HBO spent thousands on thousands of dollars replacing venues on his farm but didn't bother to spend the couple hundred bucks to put accurate New Jersey plates on cars in his "old neighborhood."
Nitpicks notwithstanding, I highly recommend both the film, and Jon's underlying works, to any of you who love the "morons" of the four-legged set.