Word: doggedly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Dog, the first film to show at the new Galeria cinema, is based on Harlan Ellison's Nebula award-winning novella of the same name. The L.Q. Jones film version fails from the start; it's bad science fiction as well as bad cinematography. Ellison's story does not lend itself to the camera as there are immediate and plaguing flaws in adaptation. A Boy And His Dog is set in 2024, in an America ravaged and torn by the nuclear warheads of the Third World War. The survivors, either alone (solos) or in marauding groups (roverpaks...
...Dog...
Blood, the dog, is no Rin Tin Tin. He curses like a trooper, puns, philosophizes, teaches, and even conjugates Latin verbs. In print, Ellison creates the character intelligently enough that the reader comes to believe, empathise and imagine him. But on the screen it doesn't work. The camera strips away that imaginative process and instead offers a voice-over for Blood's thoughts, making him sound like a disembodied canine version of Mr. Ed, spouting bits of arcane knowledge. If it sounds absurd, it is, and with the premise of A Boy And His Dog destroyed, the film slowly...
...Dog Day Afternoon should have been, and almost was, a film about the pathos and mediocrity of American heroism. The portrait of Sonny, flat and droolingly sentimentalized, is still that of a man surprised by his desire for fame. Why else does he end up besieged in the bank for hours, screaming at the cops and clowning for the crowds? It's the only time in his life he's ever been worthy of public attention. "I want a military funeral," he insists solemnly near the end of the film...
...liberal, to make a trendy statement about bad cops, good robbers, Watergate and Vietnam. But he couldn't control his techniques. He cut so flippantly from one to the other--a laugh here, a sob there--that he destroyed the thoughtful consistency that would have elicited emotional response. Dog Day Afternoon ends up being as realistic and immediate as Dragnet, and no more nor less contemporary than the Nehru jacket...