HOUNDDOG
CAROLINE: The new movie “Hounddog,” better known as “The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie,” can be summed up in two words: Elvis and snakes.
RYAN: It’s like the cracked out version of the American Girl movie. This ain’t no Kit Kittredge. Honestly, I’ve never really liked Dakota Fanning, but I thought it would be interesting to see how she handled the rape scene. Ultimately, it was very disturbing, and she did an excellent job. She can’t get an Oscar nomination for it because the movie is so bad, but she was outstanding.
CAROLINE: She was great in some scenes, but annoying in others. Who knew she was gonna spend half the movie singing Elvis songs?
RYAN: It’s “Hounddog: The Musical.” Seriously, there’s almost enough singing in it to call it a musical. David Morse plays Dakota’s father, and though I loved him as Jodie Foster’s father in “Contact,” he gives a really bad performance in this. I was almost embarrassed for him, and I found myself laughing at him inappropriately.
CAROLINE: He plays a “slow adult” rather than going “full retard” as recommended by Robert Downey Jr.’s character in “Tropic Thunder,” but it so doesn’t work. Piper Laurie plays Dakota’s grandma and man has she packed on some pounds!
RYAN: I couldn’t believe it when I saw her! I thought it was a fat suit at first, but then I realized she was just fat. And not with a “ph.”
CAROLINE: [laughs’ Let’s hope they just made her gain weight for the role.
RYAN: I hated the music in this movie. I don’t know why every time someone makes an American hillbilly movie, they have to use the terrible, strummy, slow, constipated music.
CAROLINE: It’s almost as if the director saw the first ten minutes “Ray” or “Walk the Line,” and thought, “Hey, I’ll make a whole movie that’s like this.” Bad idea. It takes place in that same era, and it’s so repetitive. I was like, “Wow, we’re gonna watch Dakota and her little friend go to the swimming hole again?” I think the director was trying to illustrate what country life was like in the ‘50s, but I so didn’t care.
RYAN: As you pointed out to me during the film, there were several pointless scenes. They just weighed the movie down.
CAROLINE: Some scenes didn’t further the story at all. Some of them became relevant later I suppose. I just didn’t realize how prominently snakes would figure in this movie, and I still don’t understand why. It may as well have been called “Black Snake Moan.”
RYAN: I loved that movie! It had a lot fewer snakes in it. But you were lucky if you got out without a snakebite in this movie.
CAROLINE: It was the country bumpkin version of “Snakes on a Plane.”
RYAN: Totally. The wardrobe was good though. Dakota did not wear shoes for the entire film and I was concerned for her feet.
CAROLINE: I wondered what sort of fungi she was picking up every time she wandered down a dirt path.
RYAN: The boy who rapes her is so disgusting.
CAROLINE: Clearly they used make-up to give him that horrible pizza face. But he was better looking than that sad sack in “American Teen” who had a real live pizza face.
RYAN: I can’t even with this movie. It was boring. We wanted to see it because of the controversy surrounding the rape scene and how young Dakota was when she filmed it, but it wasn’t even that dramatic or intense. I didn’t walk away from it feeling like I did after “Monster’s Ball” or a truly disturbing movie like that. I don’t know if it was the script or the directing or the editing, but something was terribly wrong.
CAROLINE: It felt really choppy to me. Some scenes were only, like, five seconds long and then we’d be onto the next one. I was wondering if anything was gonna happen in the movie or if they were just gonna keep on having snakes crawl all over everybody.
RYAN: Robin Wright Penn was pretty good. She was the most interesting character, I think, because at least she had a good transformation. Bottom line?
CAROLINE: I do not recommend this movie at all. It’s boring and slow, and it was trying to be edgy and different but it only succeeds in some parts. It didn’t hold my interest nearly enough to tell people to go out and see it.
RYAN: It’s definitely not worth seeing in the theater. I felt like I was just waiting for that one big, dramatic scene and then after it happened I was like, “Ugh, just get me out of here already. And enough with the snakes!” Unless you just really want to see Dakota’s acting chops, I don’t recommend this film.