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The
very funny, very enjoyable How To Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
begins with a scene in which Peter McGowan (Kenneth Branagh, Love's
Labour's Lost) is being led from what appears to be a
cell to what we assume will either be a courtroom or the
electric chair. Instead,
Peter's journey takes him from the green room to the stage of a
talk show, where the formerly successful playwright is being
interviewed about his latest project, a novel about suburban
terrorism called How To Kill Your Neighbor's Dog.
After
the interview, we find out Peter is an uptight, selfish,
chain-smoking curmudgeon whose last few plays have bombed.
This has turned him into an insomniac with writer's block
and an extremely short fuse, which, in true cinematic fashion,
is exacerbated by just about everything, including but not
limited to his one-legged mother-in-law with Alzheimer's (Lynn
Redgrave), the clueless director (David Krumholtz) and star (Johnathon
Schaech) of his latest play, as well as a stalker (Jared Harris)
who pretends he's Peter.
It's
no surprise a guy like Peter hates kids, even though his wife
(Robin Wright Penn, The Pledge)
would love to have one. Enter the new neighbors, complete with a daughter named Amy (Suzi
Hofrichter) who suffers from both an overprotective mother and a
mild form of cerebral palsy.
Somehow, Amy gets Peter to act like a human being, while
inspiring his creative juices (in a purely non-sexual way -
she's just a kid).
Dog
was filmed way back in 1999 and has won about a half-dozen film
festival awards (it was the crowd-pleasing closing night gala in
Toronto's 2000 fest), but for some reason it's had trouble
finding a distributor (it premiered on the Starz Network before
hitting the big screen). It's
a shame, because it's fun to see Branagh play a really unlikable
character you can't help but root for (even though he's still
pretty much in Celebrity
mode). The film was
written and directed by Michael Kalesniko, who co-wrote the
screenplay for Howard Stern's Private Parts.
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