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DVD Review: 'Dog Days of Summer'
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Dog Days of Summer/2007
Directed by: Mark Freiburger
Starring: Will Patton, Devon Gearheart, Colin Ford
The Plot: A Drifter (Will Patton) drifts into a quaint Southern town and changes the lives of two young boys (Devon Gearheart and Colin Ford) who make his strange acquaintance. Knowing the peculiar histories of Drifters dressed all in black who arrive and leave under a shroud of mystery, and the standard formula for your garden variety coming-of-age story, it doesn't take a road map to see where Dog Days of Summer is heading. Something Wicked This Way Comes...
The Good: First off I would like to thank Anchor Bay for sending me these screeners for their movies. Dog Days of Summer will be released tomorrow on DVD.
If you're a fan of overblown nostalgic film-pieces - and by that I mean movies like Dennis Quaid's Frequency or Richard Donner's much better Radio Flyer, or even Ray Bradbury's literary work like Dandelion Wine, or Stephen King's more sentimental short stories, (I'm thinking My Pretty Pony here) you might find something in Dog Days to kick back and zone out with. I however...
The Bad: Did not.
So Dog Days of Summer is obviously nostalgia made manifest. And the Bradbury influence is powerful in every frame of the film. The real problem is Ray Bradbury's a fantastic writer, (as is the aforementioned Mr. King) - Travis Beacham and Mark Freiburger, well they're not. At least not on that level. I doubt Mr. Bradbury or Mr. King would have ever named one of their own mysterious strangers Eli Cottonmouth...
These two filmmakers might know what yesteryear should seem like, or at least what a movie incarnation of youth and pre-adulthood should look like, but they've never really been there. At least that's what I was thinking as I watched their movie. In fact I'm actually wondering if these two men were ever real boys at one time - or just apartment rats playing video games and taking dips in the ball pool at the local McDonalds. They certainly were never like the two young kids they chose to base a film upon. That fact is made obvious when you try and decipher exactly what year Dog Days of Summer is taking place in. It's a modern story, set to flashbacks. But are we flashingback to the late 60's? Is this the 80's? The clothes say maybe, the cars say sorta', the kids shoes and toys say 2009. It's the kind of detail flub that can drive a discerning film viewer a bit mad.
To me it came off just as hazy and sick in love with it's strong recollection of a time and a place that really only existed in the foggy memory bankss of grown men - but not based on personal experience, but on better fictional tales they read written by other writers. This film is dripping with Bradbury and King influences. From Something Wicked to Needful Things, we've all seen this place before. As it stands Dog Days comes off as a a smudged photocopy of those stories.
The Ugly: The only really big gripe I have about Dog Days - well bigger gripe I have than that thick smear of criticism I lay down in the last three paragraphs of this review - is that this movie certainly didn't seem like it was made for kids. There's a whole lot of things going on in this film that come off much more adult than I believe your average 10 year old will get a grasp on, or will even care to follow. Marital infidelity, crisis of faith, infanticide, baseball bat beatings of the eldery... I doubt Walt Disney would have ever sailed these rough waters in one of his films...
The Verdict: Dog Days is watchable. It might even make you reflect on your own sunny youth as well. But not on anything you may have personally experienced or discovered during that time period in your life - just the 10 or 15 books and movies you may have seen and read while growing up that told this same story a whole lot better...
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