A Day In The Life Of A Dog

Before I get started on the first of two dog and cat blogs, some links to see to. Check out Norma's blog for a look at God's sense of humour. Check out this cauliflower recipe by Krisztina. And check out Maria's post on some baseball history.

7:25 AM. Waking up. Dreamed of chasing a cat up a tree. For some reason, the cat was unhappy.

7:30 AM. Looking out the front window. No sign of that annoying squirrel. Still lots of snow in the yard. And the snow keeps falling. I wonder if winter's ever going to end.

7:40 AM. Good morning, human! How are you today? Have you seen all the snow?

7:50 AM. The human feeds me breakfast. Yum yum yum yum! I love kibbles!

7:51 AM. Feeling full and satisfied. Time to go on my first stroll of the day, human.

8:05 AM. Running through the backfields, barking my head off. I'm a bit hindered by the depth of the snow.

The human has mentioned a few times in the last few days about doubting spring will ever come.

8:30 AM. Wait a minute... what's that? 

It's that annoying squirrel!!!!

8:31 AM. Barking my head off in full pursuit of my hated enemy.

Unfortunately the annoying squirrel makes it up onto a tree branch.

8:35 AM. The annoying squirrel is staring down at me, chattering like a lunatic. He's taunting me.

Damn you, squirrel! Damn you!

9:05 AM. Have been pacing around the tree for a half hour. The hated enemy is still laughing at me.

One of these days, squirrel, you're going to get yours. You hear me? You're going to get yours!

9:25 AM. Stopping by to see Spike The Magnificent, Tormentor of Squirrels, at his place. I relay my contact report with one of the enemy. We discuss the prospect of unleashing a spring offensive.

9:30 AM. Well, see you later, Spike. I have to get back home. I might be able to mooch something from the human.

9:55 AM. Returning home. The human opens the door for me. Hello, human! Is the fireplace burning? I could really use that to dry off...

9:56 AM. The human catches me before I can get further into the house and applies the Towel of Torment to dry off all the snow in my fur.

Come on, human!

12:35 PM. Waking up from a nap. Hey, did I miss lunch?

12:38 PM. No trace of the human. Her coat and boots are gone. So is her purse. Did she go out for a drive without telling me?

1:10 PM. Well, I suppose she's not going to be back anytime soon, so I'd better do something else with my time. I wonder what's on television...

1:15 PM. Hey, Animal Planet has a dog show from England on. Now this I can enjoy!

1:20 PM. Look at that cocker spaniel. She's all attitude and sass. I like sass. I wonder why her human insists on adding ribbons to her fur.

1:40 PM. You know, I've always wondered with these shows why it is that the humans have to trot so quickly with their dog down the length of the hall. Why can't the dog have a chance to go wandering about and sniffing?

1:55 PM.  Those humans the host calls judges seem way too serious. They need a good doggie lick.

2:20 PM. It occurs to me that you'll never see a best in show sort of thing involving cats. 

2:45 PM. That Pomeranian wins top prize. That's not fair! The cocker spaniel looks much cuter!

3:40 PM. The human returns home. She's got groceries. Oh, goody goody goody. I wonder if she picked up cookies.

4:05 PM. The human has finished putting away all the groceries. She looks at me while I'm sitting patiently in the kitchen watching her. Finally she opens the cookie jar and gives me two oatmeal cookies.

Yum yum yum! I love you, human!

11:15 PM. The human is watching the late news. All sorts of bad things. You know, human, it would be much more interesting if the news broadcasts the result of those dog shows. Wouldn't that make everyone happier?

Someone Please Make Gore Verbiniski Stop

Links to see to before we get ourselves started today. Check out Norma's blog for her look at the Razzie awards. We've got ourselves another Snippet Sunday blog posted at the joint page. The Happy Whisk asks if this is true or false. You decide. Eve has an orchid blossoming.  And at The Real Maple Syrup Mob, we have a cat tutorial on how to attract rabbits. Now then, today it's time for a movie review... one that I'm glad I didn't see in the theatres. I picked it up last week on an express shelf in the library... and I was not impressed.

"People think you are dead. Better you stay that way." ~ Tonto

"Why are you talking to that horse? Why am I covered in dirt?" John Reid

"I buried you." ~ Tonto

Last summer, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer reunited with Johnny Depp for the action-western-comedy The Lone Ranger. Depp came on board to play the unlikely role of Tonto, while the title character got handed over to the inexplicably named Armie Hammer. The end result was a mess filled with distracting continuity glitches, geographical errors, story plotholes, and more problems. It bombed in the theatres, and with good reason.

The story bounces around in time, starting off at a fair in the 1930s as a boy encounters an elderly Indian (Depp), a Comanche who identifies himself as Tonto and begins to tell him the story of how he and the Lone Ranger met. This takes us back in time to 1869, where lawyer John Reid (Hammer) is on a train into Texas. The same train is carrying two prisoners, a renegade Indian, the aforementioned Tonto, and an outlaw named Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) due to be hanged. The train comes under attack from some of Cavendish's gang out to rescue their boss, and Reid and Tonto first meet while dealing with the crisis. Tonto is jailed nonetheless, we briefly meet John's sister-in-law Rebecca (Ruth Wilson) and her son. She will, of course, become the requisite love interest. 

Reid's brother Dan (James Badge Dale) deputizes John as a ranger to go after Cavendish and his gang. Things go seriously wrong, and the posse are all shot down and killed by Cavendish and the others. All except for John, left for dead but recovered by the conveniently escaped from jail Comanche who seems to think the bird on his head is alive and that the brother he has saved (the wrong brother) is a spirit walker who can't be killed.  Thus the two unlikely partners must work together in a story that brings in a horse with an attitude, a corrupt Army officer (Barry Pepper), a businessman with delusions of grandeur (Tom Wilkinson), and a brothel madam with a rather unusual prosthetic leg (Helena Bonham Carter). And it's all tied together with a whole lot of silliness.

Gore Verbinski has something of an eclectic history as a director. One of his earliest films was the priceless black comedy Mousehunt, and he's best known for the Pirates of the Caribbean films (he really should have stopped after the first three). Of those films, his production partner has been Jerry Bruckheimer, who's made a career in movies and television of loud and occasionally obnoxiously boorish stories that feature lots of explosions and rock music underscore. The Lone Ranger is, in short, the hubris of both coming back to haunt them. The film was plagued with production problems and an over the top budget straight off. The story is from a trio of screenwriters, Justin Haythe, Ted Elliot, and Terry Rossio. What they craft is filled with errors. While the story seems to be set in Texas, it moves all over the map geographically, from Monument Valley to Promontory Point (all while dragging history through the mud). It gets numerous details wrong, to say the least (as if we could expect accuracy in a film like this). It doesn't even pay attention to its own continuity- there are plenty of mistakes, such as dirt on a body that's not there in the same way in the next frame- that make you wonder if anyone was paying attention during filming.

And the film doesn't help in that it jumps around in time, not only from decades later, but often in the course of the 1869 timeline where we're seeing something one moment that might only make sense later on. It's distracting, but not in a good way. It also doesn't help to have the kid hearing the story from the elderly Tonto- it's not a framing sequence; the narration interrupts with regularity, and I found myself disliking the kid. It's probably a good idea to refrain from using child actors to begin with; something about this kid struck me like fingernails on a blackboard. They could have dropped the narration element entirely, told the film in a linear fashion, and it wouldn't feel so grating.

Verbinski and Bruckheimer assembled a crew with this production that brings mixed results to the film. Makeup actually does its job. Tonto's entire look is rather striking, and apparently based on paintings of Native peoples (though the dead bird on his head is a bit much). And Fichtner in particular looks suitably hideous as the outlaw Cavendish; he looks like he's been out in the sun for too many years and has been beaten over the head with an ugly stick, so the makeup department went out of their way with giving him that look. This also applies to set design, which evokes the Old West in a great deal of the finer details (even if the crew can't keep track of how much dirt ought to be on a body from one moment to the next).

Much of the filming was done on location, so we've got beautiful western settings (including the obligatory Monument Valley scenes that are seen in every western), and the camera work captures that reasonably well. The special effects and set work for the climax of the film, featuring two trains on a runaway chase through the mountains, also work in making the sequence work (even though geographically the start off of the sequence does not mesh with the bulk of the scene). In fact, the train sequence late in the film actually helps the movie... but not enough to compensate for the other problems that tanked the film. One other member of the crew worth mentioning. Hans Zimmer composes the score, and as usual goes for bombastic and over the top in his signature style, though it works. This is one of those cases as so often happens with movies where the score is the best part of the movie. Zimmer even incorporates Rossini's William Tell Overture into the climactic sequence of the movie, weaving the familiar music with his own score.

The cast is generally made of actors who should have known better than to get themselves in on something like this. Most of them, however, are not to blame for the fiasco this film became (one glaring exception to that). William Fichtner has been playing various dirtbags, villains, and nefarious sorts down through the years as a character actor. He's nearly unrecognizable here, but his Cavendish is an addition to that resume of roles (though Robert Redford, the ghost of Paul Newman, and writer William Goldman would object to the insult to an iconic character with the similar sounding name). Tom Wilkinson is one of those outstanding actors who's often one of the more interesting elements in any film he makes. He's playing a seemingly considerate man named Latham Cole when we first meet him, but underneath all that is a greedy bastard out to get even richer than he already is. Barry Pepper's also one of those actors who tends to be interesting to watch, and seems to suit the part of a soldier well (he's played that before in another period uniform). However, a weakness of the script itself seems to suggest his corruption just happens, which must annoy the actor.

James Badge Dale doesn't last long in this film as the lawman Dan Reid, but is at least plausible as a lawman in the Old West. He looks comfortable in the saddle, and as an actor is slowly building a good resume of work, including 24, The Pacific, Iron Man 3, and The Conspirator. I would have rather preferred him in the lead as the title character. Ruth Wilson is an actress I was unfamiliar with before now, but she plays the requisite part of the damsel in distress reasonably well, with romantic history with two brothers, and a son with one of them. I'd like to see what she's capable of in a film that's better. And Helena Bonham Carter, one of my favourite actresses, must have wondered what she was thinking getting into this film as Red. The character is eccentric and tends to come across as more of a plot device than anything else, used by the screenwriters to fill a plothole. At least Carter has a well established track record and can move off and do other things. 

The two leads are a problem, admittedly. I'll start out with the lesser problem. Johnny Depp is essentially channeling Captain Jack Sparrow with a glazed over Native American in his portrayal as Tonto. The take Depp has on the character is that of a man who's probably out of his mind, a nutcase who's crazy for the sake of being crazy, just like his signature Pirates role. It seems to me like Verbinski and Bruckheimer wanted him to play the role from that eccentric point of view rather than just as a straight on not for laughs character. Or maybe Depp has gotten to like playing eccentricity over and over again. It doesn't suit the character, though, but it's not really Depp's fault so much as it is those behind the scenes- the writers, producer, and director, all wanting to take another shot at that Pirates mentality. Johnny, do us a favour: for your next role, play something that's not eccentric.

Ultimately, the biggest problem of the film, which casts a fatal wound on it, is the actor playing the title role. Armie Hammer (why the hell did this man not change his name?) brings no weight, no gravitas, no sense of presence to the character. Tonto remarks on more than one occasion that the wrong brother came back from the dead, and in that, he's right. Dale would have been a better actor in the role, but instead we get stuck with an actor who we can't take seriously. Hammer seems to be sleepwalking through half the movie, or maybe he's just naturally boring, or maybe he's a pretty lousy actor. I'm inclined to think it's the last of those three options. It's a performance that just scuttles the entire film. This should be an object lesson to producers and directors: don't cast this guy in your film.

The Lone Ranger failed in spectacular fashion at the box office. It is filled with endless errors and gaffes that just hamper the whole thing from the point of view of the historian. The story itself is grating and derivative and wanders all over the place. It's entrusted to a director who needs to step away from filmdom for awhile and come back with something that's not so over the top. And its producer will never take a hint and just go away. Add to that a cast of supporting actors who are largely wasted in place of the spectacle of an empty story, a lead actor who needs to play a character who's not eccentric, and another lead actor completely out of his depth... and you've got the recipe for a film disaster. If you happen to watch this film at some point, you might want to make a drinking game out of this. Every time you have to roll your eyes at something in the story that annoys you, everyone takes another gulp.

And The Oscar For The Fakest Sincerity Goes To...

"And the Ogar for Most Disastrous Showing During A Hunt goes posthumously to Uthar of Grok for Uthar Gets Trampled By A Woolly Mammoth." ~ Urg, 18 421 BC

"I hate every single one of you mother****ers." ~ Vivien Leigh, 1940

"I'd like to thank the Academy for awarding me this special award for my documentary David Spade Says He's Sorry For Every Single Thing He's Ever Done. I know it was a long time coming, and I've got so much to feel sorry for. I only wish my old friend Rob Schneider could be here to see this day, but unfortunately he died in that tragic accident involving an angry crocodile while filming Deuce Bigelow Australian Gigalo." ~ David Spade, 2015

Well, the Oscars are tomorrow. Many stars will pour into the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Many entertainment reporters (an infestation on the face of the Earth) will swarm all over the red carpet. Pre-ceremony red carpet coverage has already been underway for thirty six hours. The ceremony itself, while taking up four, five, or six hours, will feel like it's ninety seven hours long. I, for one, will not be watching. I'd rather go through a root canal than watch that whole self congratulatory aren't we just great? nonsense of an awards show. That said, I decided to make some predictions on what will happen tomorrow night. Some of them might come true. Some might not. If all of them do, well, then in that case, I can read the future. 

Doesn't that just blow your mind?

Pat Robertson will issue a statement beforehand condemning Hollywood in general and Ellen DeGeneres in particular for moral depravity while pleading for his followers to send yet more of their money to his private Swiss account... that is, the ministry and its... ahem, good works.

Variations on the question who are you wearing? will be asked four thousand three hundred twenty eight times on the red carpet as various actors make their way into the theatre.

Members of the Cory Monteith Fan Club will be picketing outside, demanding that their late idol be posthumously given Best Lead Actor just because they say so.

The head of the Academy will issue a statement reminding the Cory Monteith Fan Club that the only films he appeared in before he kicked the bucket were forgettable, and in twenty years, no one will remember Cory Monteith.

Joan Rivers will be camped out in exile away from the actual red carpet, complaining to an internet website about how she's not allowed to be on the red carpet anymore.

The ceremony will be forty five minutes late getting started.

Jack Nicholson will be sitting in the front row as always, wearing his sunglasses, a smile plastered on his face, despite not having had been in a film for years.

Network executives will breath a sigh of relief that this year's host is relatively safe, unlike that douchebag from last year.

Ellen DeGeneres will feature a remark in her opening monologue about the recent Arizona legislative debacle, noting with pleasure and a beaming smile that she's married to a woman. The remark will simultaneously infuriate certain Arizona state legislators, their base, the Taliban, Iranian mullahs, Pat Robertson, FOX News, the ghost of Oral Roberts, and Rush Limbaugh.

Amy Adams will remark on the work of makeup artists, noting how realistic the wig prosthetic of a bad combover looked on Christian Bale in American Hustle, adding that Bale is lucky that's not the actual condition of his head. The camera will then deliberately pan over to John Travolta, who will be looking awkward about the hairpiece on top of his head.

At least one nominee, upon hearing that they have lost, will be captured on screen uttering a curse word. Odds are it will be Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leonardo DiCaprio will not win an Oscar.

People will wonder why they have to have those interpretive dance numbers.

Ellen DeGeneres will note at least seven times that they seem to be running behind.

The orchestra will be busy forcing people who tend to run overtime in speeches off stage by starting up renditions of Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.

Jeremy Renner will make a wisecrack about Jack Nicholson. Strangely, Jack will not respond.

Jennifer Lawrence, after the debacle of tripping on the steps, will be wearing something much more practical this year: a trouser suit. Fashion critics will be outraged and start burning her in effigy.

Bjork will have shown up for no reason, outdoing her previous record for dressing horribly at an awards show by turning up in a dress of psychedelic purple with a hubcap welded on, a rubber hose, and five vibrators hanging from strategically placed velcro straps. When asked about the dress, she will say she has a hot date later on.

Demi Moore will turn up with a date who's even younger than her last boyfriend. He says he's nineteen, and that Demi told him to say that.

Jennifer Lopez, eager to make a splash since her career flatlined, turns up in an outfit that shocks everyone: nipple tassels and an orange thong.

At his detachment in Alberta, Canada, RCMP Inspector and cranky grouch Lars Ulrich will feel grateful that for once, there are no entertainment reporters in the province.

More than one Academy voter will admit on the way inside that they did not vote for Bruce Dern as Best Actor for Nebraska, citing the fact that decades ago, he killed John Wayne in a film. "You don't just kill the Duke and think you can get away with it!" one tells reporters.

Martin Scorsese will wonder why Leonardo DiCaprio failed to win Best Actor yet again. Friends will suggest that perhaps he stop casting Leo in his films.

Ellen DeGeneres will tease Joaquin Phoenix with the question as to if he shagged the machine in Her.

The annual March Of The Dead montage will take place. Applause will greet the image of the famous. Families of producers, composers, and makeup artists who passed away in the last year will feel their grief magnified once again by hearing, who the hell is that instead of applause all around them.

Someone will ask, didn't that guy die forty years ago?

Ellen DeGeneres will be caught on camera looking at her watch, muttering about wishing she could just be at home.

Leonardo DiCaprio will bitterly ask who he has to kill to win an Oscar.

Harrison Ford will turn up on stage (to the accompaniment of the Raiders Of The Lost Ark march) to present an award, and state for the record that he is not in any way related to the drug addled mayor of Toronto, Rob "Crackhead" Ford.

Christian Bale will pass by Jack Nicholson on his way up to present an award, and be momentarily puzzled by Jack's lack of a hello.

Meryl Streep will tease George Clooney, which will lead Clooney to launch his five hundred and eighty fifth practical joke, one that will, in years to come, become legendary.

Demi Moore will scream that Jack Nicholson is dead.

Paramedics will check Jack Nicholson, confirming that he has, in fact, been dead for three hours. The March Of The Dead will be updated to include the passing of Jack Nicholson.

While paramedics remove Jack Nicholson's body, conspiracy theories will erupt on the Internet that Jack has been dead for years, and his embalmed body has been propped up in the front row at the Oscars as a tradition.

Before Best Director can be awarded, the theatre will be shaken as a sports car smashes its way into the hall, crashing into several people, killing four, including one of the last Munchkins. Justin Bieber will emerge from behind the wheel, stumbling and drunk, and stagger up on stage. While the March Of The Dead now flashes across a screen to include the four newly dead (including that no longer so cute Munchkin), Bieber will start singing Baby Baby Baby. Tommy Lee Jones will calmly walk up onto the stage and punch his lights out.

The ceremony will finish seven hours past its expected ending, and Ellen DeGeneres will apologize to morning viewers just getting up, expecting to see the morning news, the orchestra will play One For My Baby And One More For The Road, and the screen will fade to black.

The ambulance carrying the body of Jack Nicholson will crash en route to the morgue. The body will be thrown out the back and disappear. Rumours will circulate for years afterwards that Jack's a zombie.