Last Movie Watched

[David]

Any thoughts on the last movie you watched?

LAWN DOGS (1997)

Atrocious. The screenplay is like something dredged up from the imaginations of drunken college freshmen majoring in creative writing. There's no coherent theme or style or tone, & the actors are uniformly rotten. Mischa Barton, who plays the precocious, misunderstood 10-year-old, obviously had no more ability at that age than she does now. Sam Rockwell plays the loner nonconformist gardener, who achieves Zen while mowing lawns. Christopher McDonald rises to his usual level, which in this instance gives us a bird's eye view of the weeds. Kathleen Quinlan is completely wasted.

Everyone in the upscale suburb talks with a sneer or one of those community theater southern twangs, even though the story appears to take place in the midwest. Along the way, a couple of animals are killed, but there appears to be a look of gratitude on their faces. They must have known they had better roles ahead of them. The young girl gets upset & runs across the prairie in medium & long shot, like an Andrew Wyeth painting.

Not much else happens, except that some of the characters bed down with one another's spouses, & during a block barbecue some sort of point is feebly made about class distinctions & hypocrisy -- the usual student film claptrap. In fact, the whole thing feels like a senior thesis. None of the inhabitants of this seething suburb does or says anything that resembles any word or deed that has ever been said or done anywhere on earth. At one point, the Alannah Myles song "Black Velvet" plays on the radio in some guy's pickup, & it's the truest thing in the movie, which should give you an idea.

My verdict = AVOID