August 24, 2018 2 min to read

Dog Days

Cringe-worthy, and occasionally funny, Dog Days is a mixed bag of sweet moments and eye-rolls.

by Zach Saul

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about how difficult it is for people to meet each other, and how online dating, and even online friend dating is on the rise. Dog Days wants to remind everyone that there’s another way for shy people to meet, and it’s been around for ages! Through their dogs. The movie follows four separate narratives that become loosely connected by the end; an overbearing couple adopting their first child, a reporter and an ex-NFL star working through their differences; an old man who loses his dog, and a pair of new parents dealing with a flakey relative. These four stories all involve dogs, and the ways our relationships and feelings about the world are facilitated by our pets. Not all of the characters feel the same degree of warmth towards the dogs in their lives, but as the movie progresses all the characters form deeper connections of some sort with the animals in their lives.

The funniest, and most poignant sequences in Dog Days are As Tig Notaro the “dog therapist” hilariously points out - so often we project our own emotions onto our pets, and vice versa our pets take on our personalities when we’re going through hardship in life. Late in the movie when Elizabeth (Nina Dobrev) visits the dog therapist to talk about her dog’s depressive state, Notaro asks sarcastically if it’s truly her dog that’s depressed. She continues to say she couldn’t help but notice that Elizabeth didn’t even bring her dog to the session.

The film pokes fun at L.A yuppies who assume their dogs have the same needs as they do pretty effectively, but it also glorifies them to lesser success. Dog Days is an intentionally cringe-worthy film with a lot of dad-jokes, and excruciating silences—some of which were gut-busting, but mostly were painful to watch. Don’t be fooled by the dog-centric trailers, and marketing campaigns, Dog Days is a very unapologetic romantic comedy that’s much more interested in rom-com tropes, then exploring our relationship with our pets with much depth. If you are a fan of romantic comedies you’re probably going to find a lot to love about Dog Days, particularly Vanessa Hudgens and Jon Bass’ awkward chemistry.

The Good: Thanks to the declining popularity of romantic comedies and rise of the “Antihero” in Hollywood stories, movies like Dog Days that are sentimental carry a certain freshness and energy. You wouldn’t know it from the trailers but there are a lot of very funny people in supporting roles in Dog Days: Lauren Lapkus, Tig Notaro, and Thomas Lennon most notably are hilarious on screen. Although it’s been done before, you also have to admire the way Erica Oyama and Elissa Matsueda (the film’s two writers) wove together these four seemingly unconnected narratives by the end of the movie.

The Bad: Dog Days is as cringe-worthy as Meet the Parents without the comedic payoff. A consequence of following four separate narratives is that there isn’t much time for character development - and director Ken Marino had a very mixed bag of success trying to develop so many people across two hours of runtime.