Hotel for Dogs

It's true that I don't fancy myself a big fan of kids movies. Don't get me wrong, there are family movies I adore. Spirited Away for instance is family movie and that happens to be my favorite movie of all time. I'm always looking forward to the next Pixar, Miyazaki or animated Disney film.

Excluding their God-awful and apparently mandatory direct to DVD sequels of course.

But for some reason, the live action kids movies have never appealed to me. The humor is always obnoxious, the plot is generally close to nil (or flat out absurd) and they're always styled horribly. The last time I remember seeing a live-action family movie I genuinely enjoyed was in 1997 when Good Burger came out because that shit was jokes.

And yes, I'm implying that not everyone who enjoyed this film was on drugs.

But that was 1997 and between then and now are sixteen long years. I had pretty much given up hope on these types of movies. I was quite content to just sticking with the animated ones since those always came off as if someone had actually put some work into them.

But then comes along Hotel for Dogs.

I watched this movie on a really random whim a few days ago. It came out in 2009, had a few advertisements, and made $117,000,000 which is actually pretty darn good for an anonymous little film like this, which was the fifth highest grossing film of the weekend it released.

One might assume from the trailer and title that it's the standard crap that's shit out by family movie writers who can almost literally print money by calling any half-assed attempt at a film Shrek 5.

SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD ME

In Hotel for Dogs, two troublemaking foster siblings, Andi and Bruce are secretly housing a dog named Friday, despite what their foster-father and Phoebe's opinions on pets are (not good). The kids have recently been warned that if they keep up the bullshit (they just got caught ripping off a pawn shop) they'll be separated and sent to different families.

Friday runs off into an abandoned hotel where they find a plethora of other canines chilling all by themselves. Andi and Bruce sneak some food to the strays the following day and soon decide to set up a hotel.

A hotel... for dogs.

The best scene in this movie is definitely when Bruce builds all of the dogs a bunch of crazy contraptions so they can take care of themselves when no one is around. The machines are charming Rube Goldberg-esque devices that generally accomplish simple things, like putting out the food. My favorite of these was the vending machine full of shoes that the dogs could munch on.

Towards the climax of the movie, the Andi, Bruce and their few friends who have joined them are found out and the siblings are separated. It's a pretty sad scene because at that point I was somewhat invested in the characters and wanted them to succeed. Of course I knew in the back of my mind that this is a kids movie, so there's literally no way in hell that it'd have an unhappy ending.

But the ending scenes are the only real thing that bring it down. Like any family movie, it's a very predictable conclusion, with an emotional speech that changes everyone's hearts and all that business, but it does it's job.

Incredibly, there's a video game adaptation of this movie, but I see no conceivable way it couldn't be a complete pile of trash.

I dare you. I fucking dare you.

But anyway, I was actually pretty surprised with this movie. It's not too bad. I may even say that it's pretty good. It held my attention and I enjoyed it. Give it a watch some time.

8/10 - Why the fuck not?