Hounddog (2007)

Overrated and overhyped

Instant Favorite.

Great Film overall

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Dakota Fanning. I haven't seen much with her in it, but she was pretty good in Kelly Reichardt's 'Night moves'. There, she played a much more sober role than in this one, and it seemed befitting. Here, she is quite disappointing; some provocative dancing, some mediocre singing, a few teen tantrums and some awful screaming (the scene in which David Morse joins in with the screaming is truly awful). Never did she convince me of the pain and anguish Lewellen was in.The premise is relatively promising, but the story quickly becomes inane and boring. Seldom do I wish to turn off a movie, but 'Hounddog' accomplished that. The dialogues range from nothing special to truly annoying (although I was unable to understand all of them, due to the lack of subtitles), and really none of the acting was impressive, which also had much to do with the poor direction, I'm sure. There are some pretty pictures of the American South to look at, but they amount to very little here.Uninspired is the key word here, even if the story is all about being truly inspired (through blues music)... It's almost shocking to learn that the director is a prominent name in the academic world.2 out of 10.

I was intrigued by the synopsis when I stumbled upon this movie. I typically enjoy these 50's/60's coming of age period movies ala "Man in the Moon". That was my expectation, a different spin on "Man in the Moon". The movie started out pretty good and I was intrigued. Around 20mins in, story elements just seemed scattered all over the place. In the introductory scene, Lewellen discusses bruises on her body and how she's going to kill her daddy. I'm all set to witness a young girl who's obsessed with meeting Elvis, kill her dad. One of those two things ought to be her goal? Nope. That's the last thing we hear or see about her resentment towards her dad. In fact, she's quite fond of her dad through the rest of the story. So, maybe it's about her journey to see Elvis? I recognize his music is what comforts her, but the story is setup for an Elvis meeting... and when she misses out on the Elvis concert at the midpoint, I figure the ending will also involve Elvis. As a screenwriter myself, her missing out on Elvis at the midpoint has me suspect that she will not be successful in this goal, and she isn't. In fact, Elvis is really never mentioned in the last half of the movie. The snakes throughout were kinda cool, but what did they mean? Symbolism for sure... but extremely vague in my mind. Throughout the last half of the movie, I'm waiting for something to happen. I want clarity on what her goal really is, what the story's about, and I'm waiting... still waiting... and end credits. What? It's a shame that such beautiful scenery, music, and acting talent was wasted on such a lousy story. I didn't get it at all. So, I do some brief investigating and this is what I found...I've already mentioned I didn't like the story or the screenwriter's (Deborah Kampmeier) attempt at putting together a story. OK, so who's the director? Hmm, the director is also Deborah Kampmeier. Hmm, OK so who's the producer that actually liked the project enough to through some money at it? also, Deborah Kampmeier. I'm sorry to say it, but this leads me to believe that no one in the industry wanted to get on board this project. This explains the strange use of 'symbolism'(?) throughout the movie, because it was weird enough that only one person understood it... Deborah Kampmeier. I couldn't figure out if the snakes represented evil, poison, personal demons, etc... who knows? With 20mins remaining in the film, I suspected the snakes were actually symbolic for good? Perhaps a cleansing of the soul? But then at the very end, when dad goes to pick up a dead snake and the snake has a 'dead reflex' to strike... the dad is bit. Yet, Lewellen skips happily along and into the house... roll credits. What? Backup. OK, so maybe... just maybe... if she actually disliked her abusive father this would make sense. But, he wasn't abusive and she loved her father. What? It almost seems like there was an original script with a major rewrite, and no one bothered to fix the ending?I also noticed that pretty much any film Deborah Kampmeier has been associated with, has also been written, directed, and produced by herself. She's also teaches a master scene study class in New York City. Who am I, a newbie screenwriter (who can spot 20+ things wrong with this story), to critique Deborah? Hmm, maybe it's just me?

I'm not sure but these regionally restricted Southern stories seem to divide themselves into two types. In the first type, we get a series of character sketches, anecdotes without much narrative glue to hold them together. Beth Henley's stories come to mind, and slightly melancholy tales like "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter." In the other category fall stories like "To Kill A Mockingbird" and "Streetcar Named Desire", dramas in which events unfold apparently in accordance with some greater cosmic plan."Houndog" has its feet firmly planted in Type Number One. We are witness to Dakota Fanning's tragedies and triumphs as the bony but spirited preadolescent grows up in rural Southern poverty. What sustains her through loss, betrayal, and rape is her love for the music of Elvis Presley -- "Houndog" in particular.Southerners, like New York Jews, may be among our best story tellers. Both groups are still somewhat marginal, though much less so, and have a sharp eye for small characterological details. And they have a way with words.When writers come up with a tale like "Houndog" it's sometimes possible to feel that you're watching, not so much a movie with a plot, but a cinematic tribal study. You get to know what they eat and how they prepare it, what they wear, what's in their back yards, what they consider normal and what's slightly bizarro. You see the houses they live in, mostly dilapidated shacks. You see the muddy but refreshing swimming hole. And in this film you get to see a lot of the snakes they have to contend with. (I think the snakes may "stand for" something but I don't know exactly what.) The snake before the opening credits is probably a rat snake (Elaphe obsoleta quadrivittata). The one that Fanning picks up by the cornfield looks like a southern hognose snake (Heterodon simus) but I wouldn't bet the turnip patch on it. At one point, the stereotypical avuncular black man skins a rattler preparatory to eating it but the skin he hangs up to dry looks like that of a southern copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix).Sorry about all the snake stuff but they figure prominently in the movie and I found my mind dwelling on them during some of the story's longueurs.Dakota Fanning is quite a skilled little actress. She's got the character of the tomboyish kid down pat. And despite her little-girl figure she's careless about modesty, always running around in a loose dress, recklessly but innocently showing the crotch of her underpants to a pimply older adolescent, who finally violates her.Piper Laurie is good too. She's a lumpy, slow-moving, grandmother here, overwhelmed by her own piety. I wonder if she found it ironic that she once played Elvis Presley's girl friend in a 1950s movie.David Morse, as Fanning's daddy, is saddled with a role no one should have to play -- a self-indulgent slob who shacks up with women he brings home. Well, he pays for his sins. Of course, we ALL pay for our sins but his premium is especially colorful. He's out in the field on his tractor during a thunderstorm. The machine is struck by lightning and Morse is lifted bodily out of the seat, twirled around in the air like a doll being flung, and turned into a good-natured zombie with the intelligence quotient of a long-leaf pine tree. He wanders around naked while the bad guys in the pool room jab him in the belly with their cue sticks and whack his toes. At the end, he gets bit by a rattler too. I'm telling you, the guy pays for his sins.The fact is, though, that none of the acting falls short of being really good. But, alas, the script can't avoid its clichés. That black guy who gives such good advice and knows how to treat puncture wound and venomous snake bites. He even has a hypodermic syringe and, apparently, some anti-venom on hand. The victim he treats recovers far too quickly. At some point her pretty leg would look like a Smithfield ham. And the scene in which Fanning, after her rape and a period of illness and mutism, rediscovers her strength through singing "Houndog" at the black guy's urging, reaching "deep into yo' self" and singing it now not as an imitation of Elvis but in her own style. Okay, we get the message, but the camera lingers too long on Fanning's suffering features. At this point, the director rushes in from off screen holding a cue card that reads: "Cry." There are only two "good people" in the movie: Uncle Tom and a compassionate woman we hardly get to know. It's getting a little tiresome seeing young girls beaten down by men and religion without ever being defeated. I've kind of poked fun at it but I watched it with interest from beginning to end, even as I managed to avoid the more obvious attempts at manipulation. It's by no means a "bad" or insulting movie and there's a lot of talent on display.

Just watched this dreck, forcing myself to persist through its blessed end (more blessed had Lewellen been fatally bitten by a rattler as she waltzed away). The good news is that the film's well shot and somewhat evocative of the South, albeit with typical stereotypes firmly in place. Lots of heavy-handed symbolism, too, the most obvious being the snakes.Also, most of the actors are top-notch, though they've all been better than in this morass, likely thanks to superior scripting and directing in other properties. David Morse is always great and stands out here for maintaining a little integrity within the story's confines; actually, I think he'd make a great "Simple Jack" if the producers of "Tropic Thunder" decide to greenlight that project. Piper Laurie is good, too, though her role's small and one-dimensional. Granoldo Frazier's a very appealing screen presence with great gravitas despite his role being largely a cliché, the so-called 'Magic Negro' visible in a plethora of films running the gamut from "The Shining" to "The Toy" (not a hallmark of BAD films, necessarily -- many such films are very good -- but undeniably a stock cliché so venerable that if you're going to add to the subgenre you'd better make it a good one).Dakota Fanning is hard to take here. I remember being taken aback by her competence as an actor in earlier films, and NOT just in light of her extreme youth. But in "War Of The Worlds" she was just terminally annoying. To be fair, any little kid and most adults facing invasion by aliens that nasty would probably spend a good deal of the time screaming and collapsing into gibbering heaps of protoplasm, but it wasn't the situational reactions of her character that bothered me so much as a very tangible sense that, somehow, throughout she's just a little too CONSCIOUS that she's acting, and it shows. It seemed, to me, that she's basically screaming with every line and every look "LOOK! I'm an ACTOR! And I'm a REALLY GOOD ONE!!" In this "Hounddog" fiasco I get exactly the same feeling, and it both distracts and undermines the film, or WOULD undermine the film if the film wasn't flawed fatally from the outset. Actually, I thought that young Cody Hanford, as Buddy, was far more convincing and natural in his role and how he played it.The film is badly directed. The story's pretty stultifying, anyway. There're a few places where things aren't too clear; the one that had me most adrift was when Robin Wright Penn's character has her car towed and leaves. There're some true Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moments, too, like the caretaker having Big Mama Thornton ensconced in his hayloft and apparently being familiar with the process for making snake antivenin from scratch (okay, that one's slightly more plausible).I'm a big-time Elvis fan and student of the man's career and so, of course, this film's LOADS of fun for me, or would be if I actually ENJOYED running across rampant and unnecessary inaccuracies. This sort of thing is standard in film but in this case you're talking about a man whose OBSCURE songs are familiar only to a few MILLION and the errors in this film were totally avoidable; correcting them wouldn't at all have diminished the integrity of the piece. First, I find it really, really hard to believe that Lewellen, of all people, would blissfully ignore the fact that the volume was turned down on Elvis during his controversial airing of "Hound Dog" on Milton Berle's TV show and even harder to believe that she'd turn her back to the silent screen while performing her imitation (an imitation based on that very broadcast). Okay, cinematic license but, still... Regardless, given that even the richest families in the '50s didn't have VCRs or Tivo, this scene sets the date as June 5, 1956. It's hard to figure what time-traveling magic allows Lewellen to buy a copy of "Peace In The Valley" (that Elvis recorded in January, 1957) and go even further into the future to learn the lyrics to Elvis' 1961 movie song "Can't Help Falling In Love." Just to add to the fun, when the big night of Elvis' show arrives he can be heard singing "Love Me Tender" with the '70s arrangement, another totally unnecessary and conscious goof. Further, and here I realize that artistic license trumps all, Elvis didn't play anywhere in Alabama during 1956 (or 1957); his final concert in the state, until he returned on tour in September of 1970, was in Montgomery on December 3, 1955. The same error's present in "Heart Of Dixie." Still, these anachronisms are not as bad as the execrable "Cadillac Records," a nicely shot and dressed film with great music and great acting that falsely and terribly accuses a real living (well, dead, now) person of outright murder and, admittedly not quite as bad, shows Elvis in 1956 film footage dubbed to a 1969 performance of "My Babe" on TV and shows jail-bound Chuck Berry looking at (if I recall correctly) Army footage of Elvis, proclaiming something about this being the new King, and all of this AFTER the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys entered the narrative, leading me to the obvious conclusion that Elvis Presley, influenced by the Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, and that famed gunslinger Little Walter, didn't begin his professional rise until about 1968 or 1969.People, when you insert one of the most famous and scrutinized people in HISTORY into your films, be ready for some nitpicking. Do it well and we'll forgive you. Do it badly, or in a bad film (like this one), and we'll call you on it.In the end, the only part of this film worth a damn was in the trailer: Elvis (impersonator Ryan Pelton, who manages a good likeness) blowing the kiss to Lewellen. That was pretty cool.