Contour At The Movies

Overall Impression – Not one honest laugh, real emotion, effective plot point, sincere character arc, or original idea.  Other than that, it was great.

THE FOUR QUESTIONS

Who is your main character? – Jack Bruno

What is he trying to accomplish? – Professional: Keep the alien kids safe and get them back to their ship. Personal: Get Dr. Friedman (the sexy astro-physicist, not the balding gynecologist from Beverly Hills) to love him (alternatively, it might be to believe in something.)  Private: Not be the quitter he’s always been all his life.

Who’s trying to stop him? – Henry Burke and the other super-secret government people who keep things super-secret.

What happens if he fails? – Earth will be invaded by aliens.

THE FOUR ARCHETYPES

Orphan – Jack’s literally an orphan (we find out that his parents died in a car accident.)  He’s an ex-con (but the nice kind), and drives a cab in Las Vegas where he gets no respect from anyone, while also living alone in a sleazy motel.

Wanderer – After some ethereal kids jump into his cab, he tries to figure out who they are, where they’re going, and who’s trying to stop him.

Warrior – Once he learns that they’re aliens he now fights to keep them safe and get them back to their spaceship.

Martyr – Jack risks going back to jail (and his life) to rescue the kids who have been taken by the government scientists and who are about to have some non-specific procedure performed on them, get them to their ship, and defeat the alien assassin who wants to kill them.  Did I mention the alien assassin?

AND, IN THE END…

I love movies, I really do.  It is seldom that I see a movie so relentlessly bad that I find myself wishing for it to be over.   RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN represents the most creatively bankrupt storytelling I’ve seen in the past few years.

Here is a movie with so little plot that it can be vomited out in one speech by the ethereal alien children.  Before and after that, the movie devolves into one repetitive chase scene after another.

Structurally, the movie kinda sorta has everything in the right place, but it violates the rules of good storytelling (and good common sense) by purporting to be a chase movie that goes from point A to point B, yet the characters actually (and casually) return to where they started from (Las Vegas) two thirds of the way through the movie in order to pick up an ally character before hitting the road again.   It’s almost as if the filmmakers are daring us NOT to think that this is a whole lot of running around for nothing.  

And another thing…the characters don’t even RACE to Witch Mountain!  They leave Las Vegas and then drive there, leisurely, in a Winnebago.  In fact, the trip to Witch Mountain is the only section of the film where they’re actually not racing around or being pursued.

Add to this some really bad special effects and the worst flying saucer since PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, and you have a movie that is predictable, laughable, and so poorly structured that it watched like someone shot a first draft and slapped the Disney seal on it.

C’mon guys…we can do better than this. 

– Jeffrey Alan Schechter

Overall Impression – Never trust anyone over 17.  Or human.

THE FOUR QUESTIONS

Who are your main characters? – Bruce and Andi.

What are they trying to accomplish? – Professional: Rescue all the stray dogs of Central City. Personal: Not be split up.  Private: Find a real family of their very own.

Who’s trying to stop them? – Alternates between their foster parents and the animal control officers at the pound.

What happens if they fail? – They are split up and all the dogs are destroyed. 

THE FOUR ARCHETYPES

Orphan – Bruce and Andi are real, honest to goodness orphans.  

Wanderer – Andi and Bruce discover the abandoned hotel and try to figure out how to take care of all of the dogs they seem to be collecting.

Warrior – As the number of dogs grows, they have to stay a step ahead of their step parents who are suspecting that something’s up, as well as animal control whom they thwart by getting to the strays before they do.

Martyr – Once split up, Andi leaves her Dickensian Home for Girls and gets Bruce from his Dickensian Home for Boys where they make a daring rescue of all the dogs who are now in the pound.

AND, IN THE END…

All writers of children’s stories eventually face the dilemma of having to write a “Dad’s An Idiot”  story wherein kids are preternaturally smart and one or more adults are insufferably stupid.  HOTEL FOR DOGS elevates this concept to new heights (or new lows, as the case may be) by making almost every adult in the story not  only stupid, but evil.

Why would adults — presumably the demographic who made this movie — make a movie that paints them in the worst possible light?   For the money?  That’s like me taking the gig to do an adaptation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  The real crime here is that some really heroic, compassionate people such as foster parents and people who work for animal control are portrayed as scumbags.  If you want to see a good movie about orphaned kids, people who work with animals, and foster parents re-rent FREE WILLY.

Beyond this, HOTEL FOR DOGS does a disservice to writing in that it panders to its youthful audience.  The gaps of logic and story glue are so pronounced that you can almost hear the creators saying “That’s okay, it’s for kids!  They won’t notice.”  And judging by the kids I saw this with, they didn’t.   It’s not unlike BEDTIME STORIES in that way.  It’s the story logic version of Woody Allen’s observation of the systematic lowering of standards.  It used to be that a kid’s story was LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE or CHARLOTTE’S WEB.  Now it’s HOTEL FOR DOGS.  

The problem is that the next generation of writers will learn their craft from fond memories of movies like this.  We’re mortgaging our storytelling future on the cheap, I fear.

– Jeffrey Alan Schechter