A Disappointing Continuation

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

An adorable wiener-dog changes owners, impacting these four different miserable and frequently humiliated people, each with terrible personal judgment, who clearly can't take responsibility for her. Remi is a lonely 7-year-old cancer-survivor. He once calmly mentions to his mother "we're all going to die". Dawn, though now an adult, remains naive, and reacting far too positively to Brandon. Gerwig does, some of the time, evoke Matarazzo's spot-on performance. Dave is a middle-aged struggling screenwriter who teaches film school, facing students who are particularly painful to endure. And the elderly Nana is kept company by little other than her regrets.The director's pitch black humor stays strong. We meet more people who definitely shouldn't be taking care of kids, and children who are comprised entirely of depression. One mother describes cremation as "sort of like... being put in an oven". The acting is all good. This is incredibly quotable, why is there only the "heel" one on the page? The fake intermission gave me cramps from laughing. How have DeVito and Todd not worked together before this? The only of his films I haven't watched now is Dark Horse. I love them all(this very much included), though I admit they aren't all equally good(this is one of the "not the best" ones. But I'm ecstatic that I watched it). I watched this as soon as I could, it's available for free streaming on my library's website. It never hit my cinema, an indie and all.The trailer tells you it's hilarious, in that dark way he does: if you watch that, you should have a fair idea of what to expect. Note that a lot of the negative reviews are from people who saw the title, and nothing else about it, and expected it to be heartwarming, rather than, y'know, soul-rending. Storytelling has problems from pacing as it's about such different people and stories; Happiness, the people have stuff in common. This fares pretty well. More exploration of "the h*** of suburbia", and the misery of middle America. The running time is 81 minutes without credits, or 84 with.Yes, the ending is shocking. But if you don't think there was a reason for that...then your mind is not twisted enough for Solondz' work. I recommend this to any fan of his. 7/10

Well, what a let down. Here's me expecting a feel-good, laugh out loud comedy about a dog and instead I get a dull, boring and almost entirely laugh-free drama in which, towards the end of the film, the dog hardly even features. 'Wiener-Dog' couldn't have been any more uninteresting if it tried.The problem is that none of what is happening in this film has any purpose. None of it leads anywhere, it's just one pointless story after another. The dog is completely irrelevant for the most part of the film, only at the start does the dog feature centrally in the story. A big disappointment and huge waste of time.

I will never get this 90 minutes back in my life. I can appreciate dark humor, but this movie was just so poorly written and directed I have to say probably the worst film I've watched in my entire life. Really bad. The beginning was bad. there were a few amusing moments in the middle and the end was just such... it's not worth your time. staring at the wall for 90 minutes would be more entertaining.

Spoiler. But I wish I had seen a spoiler for this movie. I wish I had known that the wiener dog runs into traffic and gets RUN OVER BY A TRUCK ON SCREEN and then run over again and again on screen before wasting 2 hours of my life watching this. I cannot un-see this now and it will play over and over in my mind for days to come now. Very upsetting. I should have had a clue when one of the characters straps a ticking bomb on the wiener dog in the previous vignette; I had a feeling... if I saw this film in a theater I would have walked out. I cannot believe it has even 5 stars--the characters are absolutely horrible. There's nothing redeeming whatsoever about this movie which is disappointing considering how much I loved Welcome To The Doll House. WTF? AWFUL and I will have nightmares for weeks now.