Digital streaming debut for the pet-lovers' movie of the year: Cindy Meehl's THE DOG DOC

It took but ten minutes into the new opened-theatrically-but-then-the-theaters-all-closed-so-now-it's-streaming-digitally documentary, THE DOG DOC, before my tears began flowing. If you, too, are a sucker for needy animals and the people who help them, this is certainly the movie for you.

For many of us, that would be enough, but this particular film, produced and directed by Cindy Meehl (shown at right), offers a lot more, TrustMovies believes, because it and the main physician in it, the veterinarian Dr. Martin Goldstein, practices a form of integrative medicine that the farther you get into this documentary the more you may question why we humans are not being treated in this manner by our own current medical establishment.

Dr. Goldstein (below, with patient) has been practicing for some 45 years now, and from what we see of him, his staff and the satisfied owners of his clients, he has been pretty damned successful. Less successful has been his attempts to bring his form of Integrative veterinary medicine -- which "combines conventional therapies with complementary and alternative medicine for a comprehensive collaboration of diagnosis and treatment" -- into greater usage throughout the veterinary establishment.

His results with patients -- granted they're anecdotal and piecemeal -- remain awfully impressive. Dr. Marty, as he is known, invites naysayers to come into his establishment and watch what goes on. When one of these professionals does just that -- we hear about this from the formerly disbelieving doctor himself, after the fact -- he literally faints dead away. Not out of horror but from pure amazement.

Ms Meehl knows how to make a smart, appealing movie. From the outset, as she introduces our hero and shows us the patients he treats, the documentary amuses and informs. One of the doc's first patients we meet is Waffles, a short-haired white dog near death from a rabies shot that probably oughtn't have been administered. Goldstein is definitely not anti-vaccine, but only healthy dogs ought to be vaccinated, he insists ("It says this right on the label of the medicine!"). Otherwise, you are further compromising an already compromised immune system.

We return to Waffles (above) and his recovery and further slippage a number of times throughout the film, which is salutary, since this dog's case brings up so many germane issues -- from vaccinations and treatments to how long to keep an animal alive despite its sickness, together with how the dollar cost of treatment impacts on the whole scenario.

Two other dogs, given up on by conventional methods, are brought to Goldstein with cancer of the jaw. How these play out are quite different but, again, both are handled intelligently and with great care by doctor and pet owners, while giving us a most interesting look into cryosurgery.

Along the way, we learn about Goldstein's history and his current family life, all of which adds to our enjoyment and understanding. At the inspiring finale, we're with the good doctor as he addresses a class of veterinary medicine students at his alma mater, Cornell University. Over the end credits we're treated to a great old Cat Stevens song that, if you've never heard it, will put a smile on your face. If you already know it, what a delight to hear it again!

From FilmRise and running 101 minutes, The Dog Doc is available now to stream digitally via Amazon and/or iTunes.

A kind of canine Kedi arrives on DVD: Mary Zournazi's doc, DOGS OF DEMOCRACY

Since both the very popular cats-of-Istanbul documentary, Kedi, and the just-now-arriving-on-DVD doc about some Athens canines, DOGS OF DEMOCRACY, were made in 2016, I don't think you can accuse either of any kind of plagiarism. Yet it's very difficult to watch the latter without constantly recalling the former. Kedi is the longer film (by 21 minutes) and the better one -- more graceful and professional -- too. But writer/director/ cinematographer Mary Zournazi's 57-minute movie is still very much worth seeing.

Ms Zournazi (shown at left) is the Australian daughter of a pair of Grecian ex-pats who only recently made her first trip to that "cradle of democracy," which was at the time (and still is) going through an economic crisis which has put that country's 99 per cent into a state of what appears to be an ongoing and maybe permanent kind of "austerity" which has thrown a huge amount of its population into actual poverty (or even deeper poverty). And while the general public has done everything from continually protesting this austerity and had even elected a government that tried to do something about this, it has all been to little avail. The uber-sleazbag politicians who brought Greece to its knees seem to have gone unpunished, and, as usual in our current western would-be "democracies," it is the public who pays for it all -- over and over and over again.

While Kedi was barely political (I recall a single anti-Erdoğan slogan appearing as graffiti; anything more and its filmmaker might not still be among the living), Dogs of Democracy definitely is. Like the cats of Kedi, these dogs live on the streets and are cared for only via the good will of the humans who help them.

Yet they seem to have taken their place as canine helpers of the many protestors who regularly take to the streets. The dogs have endured tear gas attacks, just as have the protestors, and have had their already short life span made even shorter.

We hear from one of the people who care for the dogs -- himself a homeless person -- that a stray dog's life expectancy is around three years, due to the probability of being hit by an automobile or poisoned. As in Kedi, we meet a number of the folk (above and below) who make it a point to care for these animals, and we're also given a little history of Greece and its dogs, in particular one famous canine who regularly visited a POW camp during World War II and which, more than any of the Germans in charge of the camp, attested to the humanity of the prisoners there.

The movie is a pretty interesting -- but also pretty uneven -- mix of interviews, visuals, poetry, prose, dogs and history (and, finally, even a single cat!). For animal lovers of any sort, I should think it will be a slam dunk, given how bracing and often moving is its mix of animals helping humans and humans helping animals always turns out to be.

Among the various folk we meet, the most famous face probably belongs to Yanis Varoufakis, the economist/academic/politician who served for six months as Greece's Minister of Finance back in 2015 -- though he, like some of the others interviewed here, are identified only by their first name. This may be cozy but it's not particularly professional. The movie could have used a bit more rigor.

From EPF Media and released via MVD Entertainment Group, the documentary hit the street earlier this month and is available now for purchase or (I would hope) rental.