Review of Hotel for Dogs (2009) by Chads. — 16 Jan 2009
There's truth in advertising: "Hotel for Dogs" is indeed, a movie about a hotel for dogs. But despite the "Snakes on a Plane"-like title, this prosaic moniker delivers more than it promises; the film could easily be called "Utopia for Orphans", or "Hold Me Now: An Appreciation of the Thompson Twins".
Carl(Kevin Dillon) and Lois Scudder(Lisa Kudrow) are foster parents who play music for a living; they're an aging male/female rock duo in the tradition of Animotion, Timbuk 3, and Roxette. Needless to say, they're from the eighties(the early-to-mid-eighties are the new late-sixties).
What makes this husband and wife team specific to the Thompson Twins, is how the personal lives of(drumroll, please) Alannah Currie, Tom Bailey, and Chris Leeway informs the hotel personnel's. While Heather(Kyla Pratt) puts on a brave face, Andie(Emma Roberts) and Dave(Johnny Simmons) hook up, which was Leeway's fate(who is black like Heather) when Currie and Bailey became an item.
Is it mere coincidence that the band was named after characters in the Herge comic strip, "The Adventures of Tintin"? Snowy(the protagonist's dog) was a fox terrier; in "Hotel for Dogs", Friday, a Jack Russell terrier, is white, the color of snow.
The eighties tropes don't end there. Heather's willingness(the film hides her masochism, her angst) to help Dave at the dog hotel, strongly recalls Watts, the Mary Stuart Masterson character in Howard Deutsch's "Some Kind of Wonderful".
When Heather steps in dog poop, the action itself works as a metaphorical encapsulation of Watts' doggone loyalty for Keith(Eric Stoltz). "Hotel for Dogs", by no means, is White Stripes-good, but the Thompson Twins weren't strictly for the dogs, just like this disposable film.
So it's one "woof" for recasting PETA's rhetoric in a filmic language that might galvanize, rather than offend the non-converted, with it's pro-animal message, and one "woof" for being geuninely fun to watch.
"Hotel for Dogs" is "King for a Day", or ninety-and-some-odd minutes.
This review of Hotel for Dogs (2009) was written by Chads. on 16 Jan 2009.
Hotel for Dogs has generally received mixed reviews.
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