Wiener-Dog (2016)

Jack and I like the sick and twisted work of Todd Solondz (last blogged for Dark Horse), including his latest: four shorts with one dachshund in common. Its slow pace and script will make many folks uncomfortable and I believe that's the goal of director/writer Solondz.

Four (identical to us) dogs portray the title character, all with lustrous brown coats. We first meet Wiener-Dog as she joins the dysfunctional family of Tracy Letts (he had a small part in Elvis & Nixon and 24 episodes of Homeland as Andrew Lockhart), Julie Delpy (most recently in Before Midnight), and their young son, played by Keaton Nigel Cooke, with a beautiful face that somehow reminded me of Heather Matarazzo, who played Dawn Wiener in Solondz' breakout Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). Dawn was taunted with the nickname Wiener-Dog by her middle school classmates. Matarazzo was offered the role of a grown-up Dawn in this movie, but turned it down. Greta Gerwig  (last in Maggie's Plan) stars in chapter two as Dawn and makes some bad choices with Kieran Culkin (most recently in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).

Chapter three features Danny DeVito (last in these pages in A Solitary Man) as an angry and depressed professor, and in the final chapter the pooch is adopted by Ellen Burstyn (most recently in Interstellar), also angry, who is visited by her granddaughter Zosia Mamet (after The Kids Are All Right she had series arcs on Parenthood and Mad Men and, of course, her 43 episodes of Girls. Season 5, episode 3, entitled Japan, stands out for Mamet's fabulous performance). Fun fact: her name is pronounced ZAH-shah ("like Sasha with a Z," she says).

Composer James Lavino's youtube channel doesn't have this movie on it, but I think I liked the soundtrack when we saw this four weeks ago.

I'm guessing that Rotten Tomatoes' critics, averaging 73%, knew what they were getting into when they saw this, as opposed to its audiences, coming in at only 46.

Remember--sick and twisted. Don't take your kids to see the sweet puppy! And some sensitive adult animal lovers may be distressed as well. Jack and I, well, we're not so sensitive, and we laughed quite a bit. If you also like this sort of thing, its DVD release is set for August 23, 2016.