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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 - 1 Comment »
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Marley & Me

I finally got around to watching Marley & Me, which releases on DVD today. Maybe it’s partly because I’m a dog person who’s enormously attached to her own canine companion (a sweet, hyper little Jack Russell named Sophie), but I loved the hell out of this movie. Great performances by both Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson — Wilson sometimes gets on my nerves, but here he was perfect. I liked the use of this couple’s ongoing relationship with their crazy dog as a device to track the trajectory of a marriage from that blissful honeymoon optimism when all things seem possible, through the inevitable changes that life brings to all of us, both individually and in our partnerships — especially when children come along and we’re forced to assess our values and make hard choices.
I liked Marley & Me much, much more than expected to, even given the positive reviews I’d read; in fact, it may be my favorite family movie of the past several years. I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised, given that one of the screenwriters on it is Scott Frank, who’s penned some awesome films including The Lookout, Minority Report (yes, I did actually like that one), Out of Sight and Get Shorty. And it’s directed by David Frankel, who helmed The Devil Wears Prada, which I also liked.
My one quibble with the film is that I didn’t find it realistic that a family with kids living on the single income of a newspaper columnist (even with his salary doubled when he agrees to write the column daily) could possibly afford to buy the home they move to in Boca — not a mansion, sure, but it’s a newish home, large and very nice, with an inground pool. I poked around on Boca real estate sites and homes that look similar to the one they move to in the film look to go for around $1,000,000; is it at all realistic that a newspaper columnist, even before the layoffs hit hard, could have afforded a home like that? Seriously? I live in Seattle, and our family lives fairly decently on two incomes — mine as a film critic and editor and my husband’s as a tech writer working on a contract gig for a “major software company in Redmond, WA.” We make a decent living, but there’s no way in hell we could afford to buy that expensive a house on two incomes, much less one. I’m just saying.
Then again, when Aniston was on Friends, she and Courteney Cox lived in a remarkably spacious and well-appointed New York City apartment for what their income level was, so I suppose I should just let go of my tendency to obsess over the details and just appreciate that I liked the movie overall. Great family film with a lot more depth than I expected, and well-worth owning on DVD, whether or not you have kids to pretend to buy it for. It’s a good film to have on-hand for those morose, moody kind of nights when you just want to curl up under a quilt with a nice glass of wine, a good movie and a box of tissues, get your heart warmed up, and have a good cry. Because you will cry at the end –yes, even you, tough guy. So here, have a tissue.

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One Response to “Marley & Me”

  1. bunnybeth says:
    March 31, 2009 at 5:32 pm

    I’m going to add this one to my Netflix account. Thanks, Kim.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon