All about service dogs and the folk they serve: Heddy Honigmann's lovely doc, BUDDY, opens

Hot on the heels of another fine, festival-favorite doggie documentary, Los Reyes, comes an equally good doc concerning service dogs (real ones, not these ubiquitous "emotional support" animals) and the disabled humans they serve -- in so many ways.

Written and directed by Peruvian-born, internationally-known documentarian Heddy Honigmann (who made that great doc Forever, about the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris), BUDDY takes us into the lives of six amazing service dogs and the equally interesting folk they assist.

Honigmann, shown at right, bounces back and forth between the six dogs/owners, and eventually we get quite a rich picture of these people, their animals, and the situation in which each of them finds him or herself. The subjects she chooses to question the humans about often provide entryway into more than that initial subject, and clearly her manner with humans and animals puts both at ease. There is never any sense here of the filmmaker prying or poking where she is unwelcome. And this serves to make the viewer comfortable and welcome, as well.

One man is an increasingly disabled veteran (above) with PTSD and a dog named Mister; another is a woman in a wheelchair who, with the help of her dog, manages to work and live and even produce ("He's my freedom!" she notes of her dog, Kaiko).

There's a young boy (below) who's somewhere on the autism spectrum, who, among other gifts, gets the necessary calming support from his dog, while a blind woman on her 80s, who seems perhaps the most physically active of all of these people, still runs like a teenager -- with the help of her dog, of course.

If you're anything like TrustMovies, you'll have long been impressed with what these service animals can accomplish. Still, by the time you watch as one dog actually turns his mistress over in her bed, pushes a hypodermic syringe into her body, takes off her socks and pulls up her blanket, you may wonder if you're suddenly in science-fiction land.

Yet unlike robots, these are animals you can also cuddle and love and who respond to that love. Aside from the real and very important work these dogs do, their emotional bond with their owners seems equally so. When one of the dogs suddenly dies, this'll hit you something fierce. Until you see and then further imagine what it has done to the dog's owner.

A shoo-in for any animal lover, Buddy -- in Dutch with English subtitles and running 87 minutes -- should also appeal greatly to those who work with or are interested in the lives of the disabled. Further good news: Grasshopper Film has just picked up distribution rights to Buddy. So, after its  two-week U.S. theatrical debut this coming Wednesday, March 20, at Film Forum (which has previously hosted five other of Honigmann's documentaries), it should play elsewhere around the country. This is a movie that ought to hit all the big cities and eventually stream everywhere else. Click here and then scroll down to click on Where to Watch to view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Note: The above "doggie bone," specially made for Film Forum, will be on sale at the concession during the two-week presentation of Buddy.

LOS REYES: Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff's canine treat is a doggone winner

The Miami Film Festival opens today and continues through March 10 (you can find out all about it by clicking the above link), and though TrustMovies has seen only a single film in the huge array, it was both good and unusual enough to merit a visit to this annual local cinema event.

I should think that dyed-in-the-wool dog lovers will cream their jeans over LOS  REYES, the new film from Bettina Perut (below, left) and Iván Osnovikoff (below, right). Los reyes translates to the kings and is the name of the oldest skate park in Santiago, Chile. Viewers of this new documentary, however, may rightfully imagine that the name applies to the two stars of the film: Fútbol (above, left) and Chola (above, right), the two stray dogs who have made their permanent home in the park.

The canines seems to have worked out a kind of peace with the many skateboarders who zip and zag around them in the park, and the two animals are the major subjects of this rather amazing movie. The filmmaking team shows the dogs but tells us nothing about them, and this refusal to anthropomorphize the pair in any way is welcome and smart.

Other than ambient sounds, the only dialog we hear is that of the young people who frequent the park and chat to each other about their lives. We barely see these humans but we do hear their oddball and sometimes sad stories of families in disarray, discord and drugs -- into which everything from class, economics and personal responsibility come into play.

All the while the cameras focus on the dogs -- at rest and play, barking, jumping, chasing, panting, even occasionally humping (we see a few other dogs throughout the film, but the focus is almost constantly on Chola and the increasingly aging Fútbol).

And -- oh, boy -- do our filmmakers love unusual close-ups and camera angles. I suspect you will not have seen the doggie sights anywhere else that you will see here (an insect resting on our canine's canine). We view their faces, yes, but also their paws, eyes and snouts. These are "mug shots" like no other.

The juxtapositioning of visuals and dialog makes a very strange combination, one that differentiates the animal world from the human in ways you won't previously have experienced. And this separation seems somehow necessary -- and salutary.

The park itself is at one point repainted and made ready for some kind of event. Along the way we get the sense that the young park goers we hear are somehow growing up a bit. And that the older dog, Fútbol, is declining. The shots we see of insect symbiosis with the older dog is near-shocking but very strange and even oddly moving. Nature in the raw.

Without, I hope, doing too much anthropomorphizing here, it seems to me that the filmmakers allow us to experience loss and grief via the remaining Chola. And this short scene may be enough to break the heart of even the toughest of dog lovers.  Los Reyes is something to see and experience.

The documentary, a co-production of Chile and Germany running just 77 minutes, will play during the Miami Film festival this Sunday, March 3, at 6:45pm at the Silverspot Cinema. I don't think the film has U.S. distribution as yet, but perhaps the recent showing during the FSLC's Film Comment Selects series, coupled to the current one at this Florida film festival, will help induce an intrepid distributor to come aboard.

VOD debut: Melissa Dowler's service dog documentary, ADELE AND EVERYTHING AFTER

I can't imagine any animal-lover or viewer interested in service dogs not lining up to see a new documentary that has been quite a hit on the festival circuit and makes its VOD debut this coming Tuesday, January 30. ADELE AND EVERYTHING AFTER, directed by Melissa Dowler (shown below), is the story of a young woman named Marty who has had since childhood an unusual kind of heart disease that can cause her to suddenly faint at any time and any place, sometimes leaving her bruised, bloody and concussed.

As her condition worsens with age, affecting not only herself but her young child, and with no cure on the medical horizon, Marty turns to the idea of service dogs and what help this might render. As the documentary points out, she was the first person ever to use a service dog for this affliction, and while it does take some time for her to understand the dog's "signals," once she does, the fainting never happens again. Although Ms Dowler's movie has an odd arc (its emotional climax occurs maybe halfway along), the tale told here is so unusual and will so strongly appeal to animal lovers (of service dogs in particular) that recommending this movie as a "must" goes without saying. (But for god's sake, keep a box of tissues handy; you'll need them.)

Marty's history is provided via archival footage and some enacted re-creations, but the heart of the film is given over to this woman and the two dogs who most help her: the titular Adele (above, with Marty), the first of the two, and Hector (below), the second.

The wonderful organization, Canine Partners for Life, who supplies Marty's animals, is given a lot of screen time, too, and it is fully deserved. We watch, as the new owners learn to train their dogs and come to understand their "language," and how the dogs eventually respond with such full-out help that it's sheer amazement. How do these dogs manage it? It's not all that clear as yet, but what is clear is that they do it.

And they do this constantly: in the pool, on the walk, at home, at work. Amazing. Once Marty, and we, get over the upcoming loss of Adele and the change-over to Hector, you'll use less of those tissues. For me, the most upsetting part of the film was wondering and not knowing how Adele herself felt about the loss of her "patient." Of course, that's anthropomorphizing, isn't it? But this proves difficult not to do, when the animal figure is as important as here.

As Marty and her husband both tell us, because of what Adele and Hector do for Marty, they are closer to her than even her husband. This situation -- the bond between the service animal and the owner whose life the dog saves over and over -- will prove to be something new and different for most of us to consider, and this documentary does a very good job of bringing us up-close-and-personal with many of the details of the situation.

After viewing the doc, so impressed was I with the organization, Canine Partners for Life, that I am sending it a donation forthwith. Once you've seen this remarkable film, I suspect you may be moved to do so, too.

From Gravitas Ventures and Long Haul Films, Adele and Everything After hits VOD this coming Tuesday, January 30, and will be available on most major streaming platforms -- for purchase and/or rental. 

Just a gal and her dog. And bombs. Gabriella Cowperthwaite's moving film, MEGAN LEAVEY

One of the strengths -- there are a lot of them, along with a few weaknesses -- of the new film MEGAN LEAVEY, directed by Gabriella Cowperthwaite (of Blackfish fame) and written by Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo and Tim Lovestedt is that it refuses to turn the character of its titular Ms Leavey into anything approaching the typical movie bio-pic "wonderful-person" heroine. Megan is clearly a problemed young woman who has major trouble with what we might call just plain socialization. Her "people" skills are greatly wanting, probably due to that usual combo of nature and nurture. In fact, it seems that she joins the U.S. military because it just might prove pretty much the only way out of her currently dead-end life.

As written by that above trio of screenwriters and directed by Ms Cowperthwaite (shown at left), the movie never sugar-coats Megan's lack of social skills. We're not even certain, by film's end, that she has gained much more of these, other than her newfound and terrific ability in handling military dogs.

And yet we're with this young woman -- hoping for her, even as we wince at her mistakes -- all the way. This is due to the filmmakers' skill at showing us various situations in which Megan finds herself, along with the difficult, if typical, ways in which she tries to extricate herself. Usually with negative results. We feel her pain and understand her anger, even if we also wish she could learn how to control/use it more wisely.

All this is due as much to the rich and rounded, warts-and-more-warts performance from actress Kate Mara (above, front and center) in the title role. Ms Mara keeps us with her at every moment, never more so than when, finally, she begins bonding with those military dogs and slowly discovers the one area in which she truly excels -- below -- training those dogs to sniff out possible IEDs in our still current and probably for-fucking-ever middle east wars and then remaining smart and intuitive enough to understand and interpret the dogs in action.

Ms Mara, Ms Cowperthwaite, and her crew do a bang-up job of all this, in particular one lengthy, sustained scene in which Leavey and her dog do that good work, are hit and injured for their trouble, and then keep on doing more of the work immediately after. Though Leavey and her dog(s) were responsible for many "saves" during her time "in country," this single scene is all we need to understand what her work entails and why it was so important.

Cowperthwaite is not known as an action director, but she certainly proves to be one here, and the scene is as good as anything in the recent The Wall, or any other of our middle-east war movies I can readily recall. Suspense, surprise, shock, action, drama -- the director gets it all. (Along the way, she, her writers and Mara even give us a little humor now and then to interrupt the unpleasantness at hand.)

We also get a little "family" time, during which Edie Falco (above, left) plays Megan's controlling and generally selfish mom, and Will Patton her disliked step-dad. A particularly good performance comes from Common, shown below, who proves anything but in the role of Leavy's strong, stern and caring commanding officer, Gunny Martin.

Love interest is provided by Ramon Rodriguez (below), and although he and Mara work well together and never have a dishonest moment, this part of the film seems somewhat "inserted" to provide a bit more popular appeal and to further "humanize" our girl.

No matter. What I have not yet mentioned and what is most true of this film is that it's an "animal movie" (as was Blackfish), in particular a dog story -- so animals lovers will cream and kvell at the goings-on. Deservedly. Cowperthwaite never tries to jerk those tears. There's no need. They'll come unbidden and of their own accord because of the tale told and the outcome here.

Opening wide this Friday, June 9, Megan Leavey , running just short of two hours, may prove the most successful of all the movies released so far by the little distributor Bleecker Street. It's certainly opening at the most theaters I've seen from this distributor. And why not? It's patriotic and pro-military without being stupidly "America first," animals lovers will embrace it, it's feminist without pushing things, and it's an excellent character study, too -- of a woman who can't/won't fit in and then, finally, does.

Wherever you are across the USA, to view/find the theater(s) nearest you, simply click here. In South Florida, the movie will be opening on oodles of screens, including AMC's Sunset Place 24, Hialeah 12, Aventura Mall 24, Tamiami 18, Pompano Beach 18, City Place 20, St Lucie 14, Indian River 24; at Cobb's Hialeah Grand 18 and Miami Lakes 17; at CMX Brickell City Center 10; at Silverspot Coconut Creek Cinemas; at CFB Majestic 11; at Cinemark Palace 20 and Paradise 24; at Flagship Cinemas 14; at Paragon Ridge Plaza 8 and Wellington 10; at REGAL's Magnolia Place 16, Cypress Creek Station 16, The Falls 12, Oakwood 18, Kendall Village Stadium 16, Westfork 13, Treasure Coast Mall 16, Broward Stadium 12, Shadowood 16, Southland Mall Stadium 16, Royal Palm Beach 18, Sawgrass 23, Wellington Cinema 8, and South Beach 18; and at the Regency Cinema 8 in Stuart.

Todd Solondz is back with WIENER-DOG, his own brand of sequel to Welcome/Dollhouse

I'm not at all sure I agree with so many critics who claim that the movies of Todd Solondz are misanthropic. The guy has a dark view of humanity, all right, and of life as it's lived by so many of us on this maybe-soon-to-be-uninhabitable earth. Yet the feeling I am left with, time and again after viewing his films, is one of sadness more than anger or hatred at our "miserable selves." (That his films are leavened with a lot of humor, black as it often is, also adds to their enjoyment level.) I'd call Solondz an angry humanist.

The filmmaker's latest outing into the land of the lousy is WIENER-DOG, which doubles as a kind of sequel to his first real indie hit, Welcome to the Dollhouse, which, among other things, put actress Heather Matarazzo on the map. But Solondz being Solondz (the filmmaker is shown at right), the film is very different from almost any sequel you'll have seen because its star, and the "link" that joins each of its segments, is an adorable little dachshund, the wiener-dog of the title. Functioning as a kind of all-purpose object upon which the humans that surround it can heap whatever nonsense they like (think maybe Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar, but -- heresy, I know -- Wiener-dog is the better movie), this little dog is something else.

Yes, we do encounter a grown-up version of Dawn Wiener (the character played in the original by Ms Matarazzo), and here she is performed by none other than the new indie queen (though now somewhat mainstream), Greta Gerwig, who becomes, as Ms Gerwig always manages to do with each new role, this character to an absolute T.

But we only spend a little time with the new Dawn, as in fact we do with all the characters that act as satellites to our Wiener-dog, who moves from owner to owner -- the first of which we is Solondz's typical suburban family ripe for rot. In this case that includes mom (Julie Delpy, below), dad (Tracy Letts) and little son (a lovely job by Keaton Nigel Cooke, above). Entitled, self-serving, lying, hypocritical and seriously deluded, mom and dad manage to just about decimate their sickly son's little dog.

From its nuclear (holocaust) family through Dawn and a traveling Mariachi Band (shown at bottom), then to a pair of young marrieds with Down Syndrome, our Wiener moves from person to person, place to place. Solondz doesn't always let us see or even learn how these folk are connected, nor does he need to. By now we've seen enough movies to know the "connection" ropes. And he is a skilled enough filmmaker to have each scene grab us with immediacy, force and often fun.

The filmmaker even provides his 90-minute movie with its own short but smart intermission, during which there's not enough time to go get popcorn but at least we hear a terrific little song during the break. And then we're back to business as our Weenie rests in the hands of a NY film school professor and would-be screenwriter (played with delightful manic perseverance but noticeably declining gusto by Danny DeVito). Solondz uses this section to make sweet and nasty fun of independent film, auteurs, education, Hollywood and more -- and for the one sublimely hilarious scene alone, in which DeVito and the school's head interview a prospective student, this movie is worth seeing.

Then our dog is whisked away to the lap of Ellen Burstyn (above), doing another of her recently fine round-ups of aging matriarchs (House of Cards, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You), on whom her granddaughter (Zosia Mamet, below) pays a call with her artist boyfriend (Michael Shaw) in tow. From each new owner, Wiener gets a new name but soldiers on, as ever. How our doggie becomes immortalized is, as they say, one for the books. But not, I think, for PETA people.

The movie is dark, ugly, sad, hugely comic and full of wonderful performances -- as you'd expect from a cast this good. Crowd-pleasing it ain't, but Mr. Solondz knows exactly what he is doing. Long may he grow angry, hold up that mirror to our foibles, and keep on filming them.

From IFC Films and Amazon Studios, Wiener-dog hit theaters last weekend in New York and L.A. and will opens here and there around the country this coming Friday, July 1. In South Florida, you can see it in Miami at the Bill Cosford Cinema and Miami Beach Cinematheque. Then on Friday, July 8, it opens in Boca Raton at the Living Room Theaters.

Kornél Mundruczó's amazing, troubling WHITE GOD: like no canine movie you'll have ever seen

Old Yeller was never like this. Kornél Mundruczó's Hungarian masterpiece, WHITE GOD, (Fehér isten) will leave you in some kind of state -- grace, shock, awe, or maybe just amazed at the proficiency of this filmmaker, the only other work of whose I've seen is the odd, and oddly memorable, Delta from 2008. I believe it is safe to say that there has never been a "dog movie" anything like this one -- which within (or, hell, without, too) its genre, also becomes a revenge thriller, an allegory about "the other," ode to "dumb" animals, sci-fi/fantasy epic and more. It jumps so many genres so thoroughly that it simply becomes sui generis.
And then some.

Directed and co-written (with Viktória Petrányi and Kata Wéber) by Mr. Mundruczó (shown at right), the film begins with a scene of marvel -- and one that does not look particularly CGI-ed. I can't claim to be any expert on special effects, but when they look as real, as genuine and "special" as they do here, attention must be paid.

The film then flashes backward to a previous time, in which its story carefully unfolds, before eventually catching up with itself. We've seen this done many times before. What we have not seen is all this taking place in what can best be called a "dog movie."

That dog -- a character called Hagen (he is actually played by two dogs - one of whom is shown at left, sporting a bowtie at Cannes, where he was evidently the toast of the festival) -- is a keeper. You'll fall in love with him instantly, but be warned: What happens to Hagen is not easy to bear. Dog lovers won't want to miss this movie, but they may have a damned difficult time getting through it.

Hagen is the beloved pet of a high school girl named Lili (talented and beautiful newcomer Zsófia Psotta), about to spend three months with her estranged father due to her mom's having to go abroad for work. Dad is not much of a caretaker, and he most definitely does not like dogs. Trouble ahead.

The movie will make you wonder if Hungary, the country from which it comes, is particularly anti-canine. Or if perhaps this goes with the territory of most of Eastern Europe. From what we see here, much of the populace couldn't care less about the creatures -- who are, evidently, not considered the Eastern European man's best friend -- unless he can make a killing off them, in the process perhaps killing the animal itself.

A large section of this film deals with what happens when Hagen comes into contact with a man who trains dog for fighting. This is by far the most difficult portion to watch, and yet it is also one of the film's strongest, calling into question the old nature/nurture theory once again.

Parenting is another major theme, as is coming-of-age, and to its credit, Mundruczó's movie doesn't shy away from the difficulties here, either. What make it work so well is how all these themes -- including that of the unwanted, the "other" -- are so thoroughly fused that you finally cannot (nor would want to) separate them.

Music and its uses are paramount, as well, bringing to mind again those "charms to soothe the savage breast." The finale -- fierce, rich, suspenseful, emotional -- is both monumental and mysterious. I suspect this is a scene you will never forget.

White God (even that title is loaded and mysterious), one of the finest films Magnolia Pictures has yet released, recently screened as part of the New Directors/New Films series, opens theatrically this Friday, March 27, across Canada and in New York City at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema. The Friday following it hits six more cities, including Los Angeles (at the Landmark NuArt) and then makes its way across the country in the weeks and months to follow. You can see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters, by clicking here.