FILM REVIEW OF ''MARLEY & ME" (2008)

Anybody who wants a pet Labrador retriever should watch the new Owen Wilson & Jennifer Aniston canine comedy “Marley & Me” (*** out of ****), so they’ll know everything that Labs chomp. Clearly, director David Frankel, whose last movie was the Anne Hathaway career comedy “The Devil Wears Prada,” wanted to explore entirely different themes, and he succeeds on the whole with this sentimental, shaggy dog saga. Ostensibly, scenarists Scott Frank of “Get Shorty” and Don Roos of “Bounce” adapted former “Philadelphia Inquirer” columnist John Grogan’s memoirs about the 13 years that his family and he spent with a Lab. Basically, Hollywood makes two kinds of dog movies: those where the dog lives and those where the dog dies. Smuggle in a box of Kleenex if you see “Marley & Me.” Mind you, “Marley & Me” amounts to suburban schmaltz, nowhere as realistic as the Disney classic “Old Yeller” (1957) where the boy shot his dog after the animal contracted rabies. Despite some mild profanity, “Marley & Me” qualifies as family-oriented fare. Indeed, this aw-shucks, PG-rated, feel-good flick about a loyal but neurotic Alpha Lab will amuse you and make you chuckle, even though it wears out its welcome with its two-hour plus running time. Aside from one scene involving a dog obedience trainer, you shouldn’t have to explain anything to your little ones.

John (Owen Wilson of “Drillbit Taylor”) and Jenny Grogan (Jennifer Aniston of “Derailed”) marry in snowswept Michigan and promptly move to a warmer climate. They settle in Palm Beach, Florida. Jenny lands a job as a features writer at The Palm Beach Post. John’s college chum Sebastian Tunney (Eric Dane of TV’s “Grey’s Anatomy”) gets him an interview at The Sun-Sentinel. Grumpy Sun-Sentinel editor Arnie Klein (Alan Arkin of “Inspector Clouseau”) hires John on the spot and sends him off to cover stories about speed bumps, methane fires, and the latest Rotary Club row. Jenny likes to make lists, while John tries to accommodate those lists. No sooner has our cute couple settled into a three-bedroom house than Sebastian warns John that Jenny will want a baby unless he sideswipes her biological clock. Sebastian suggests John buy her a dog. John sells the dog idea belatedly to Jenny after he blindfolds and takes his wife out to a dog farm. They pick what comes to be known as ‘the clearance dog.’ Jenny has to cover an out-of-town trial, so John gets to pick up the pooch. On his way home, John hears Bob Marley reggae music on the radio and decides that the musician’s last name is ideal for his hound. The Grogans learn quickly that life with Marley won’t be a picnic. Marley devours dog food like a glutton. Moreover, this incorrigible cur chews up pillows, bras, sofa cushions, and even Jenny’s necklace. He likes to chase the UPS man, the mail man, and he steals a next door neighbor’s turkey dinner.

When director David Frankel and his scribes aren’t depicting Marley’s next prank, they dwell on the ups and downs of domesticity. The Grogans have a tough time getting their family started, but they wind up with three kids, two boys and a girl. Jenny quits her job to play house mom and discovers the toll that some young moms encounter after having kids. John sacrifices his dream of being a reporter and reluctantly accepts a cushy columnist’s job. As it turns out, John’s editor Arnie loves our hero’s columns about his rambunctious yellow Alpha Lab who destroys restaurants, causes traffic jams, and assaults dog obedience trainers. Anybody who loves Kathleen Turner had better be prepared for a shock. Turner turns up in a cameo as Ms. Kornblut, gravelly-voiced battle axe, far from the delectable dame of “Romancing the Stone.” Marley drags Kornblut around on his leash and then . . . well, you’ll have to take the little ones aside and tell them about the birds and the bees. Eventually, Marley grows old and we know that something dire is in store.

It’s difficult to believe that the real-life Grogans lived this sunny lifestyle. Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston maintain their fluffy blond mops and slender waistlines. Rarely do they blow a fuse. Occasionally, Jenny screams about Marley’s problem with thunderstorms. He howls like a conscientious bloodhound that has just cornered a raccoon in a tree and he doesn’t stop until the rain stops. Eric Dane plays John’s best friend and babe magnet Sebastian who snags all the great newspaper stories and eventually becomes a New York Times reporter. John envies Sebastian and then when John leaves the Sun-Sentinel for The Philadelphia Inquirer to write real news, he realizes how much he loved being a columnist. Nobody told him how to write his own column and everybody loved to read it. It’s also pretty hard to believe that John Grogan pulled down the kind of salary that enabled him to buy a sprawling house with a swimming pool in Florida and then later an even bigger one in rural Pennsylvania. Reportedly, from young puppy to old dog, Frankel had to use as many as 22 dogs to impersonate Marley.

As far as canine comedies go, “Marley & Me” doesn’t spring many surprises, but this harmless potboiler about a bad-to-the-bone dog does a good job of straining on your heart strings.

FILM REVIEW OF ''BOLT 3D"

The new animated 3-D Walt Disney family flick “Bolt” (*** out of ****) is pretty doggone funny. Combine elements of the Arnold Schwarzenegger epic “Last Action Hero” (1993) with the dogs trekking across America in the 1963 Disney classic “The Incredible Journey,” and you’ll have a fair idea about what this cute canine comedy delivers. “Bolt” is the first Disney animated feature produced by the Mouse House since Pixar genius John Lasseter of “Toy Story” fame assumed creative control. Like previous Lasseter movies, such as “Cars,” “A Bug’s Life,” and “Monsters, Inc.,” the animation in “Bolt” is something to bark about. The incomparable 3-D digital projection is what distinguishes this lighthearted flick. Meanwhile, “Mulan” co-scripters Byron Howard and Chris Williams, who teamed up to helm this hilarious hokum, drum up a lot of jokes about a deluded doggie who dreams that he possesses super heroic powers. “Pulp Fiction” star John Travolta furnishes the voice for the feisty German shepherd puppy, and Disney singing sensation Miley Cyrus voices Penny, the teenager who adores Bolt at first sight when she spots the little nipper at an animal shelter.

The premise of “Bolt” is as fetching as it is far-fetched. Bolt—complete with a jagged lightning insignia across his ribs—becomes the top dog of a prime-time, Google Generation, sci-fi TV show. The contemporary equivalent of Lassie, our four-pawed protagonist shows no fear in a crisis. In the context of the show, Penny desperately searches for her father who has been abducted by an evil Bond-type villain, Dr. Calico (Malcolm McDowell of “A Clockwork Orange”), flanked by two haughty cats. Before Penny’s poppa got kidnapped, he enhanced Bolt with cybernetic powers that make this man’s best friend as powerful as Will Smith’s “Hancock.” Bolt’s prime directive is to protect his ‘person,’ Penny (Miley Cyrus of “Hannah Montana”), from Dr. Calico’s black-clad henchmen. Bolt is so strong that he can smash head-first into a car and send it spinning end-over-end 50 yards in the air. He can turn eyes into molten lasers and burn through anything. Furthermore, he can hightail it down a street faster than a greyhound on afterburners and leap above a hovering helicopter’s whirling rotor blades!

In reality, however, Bolt is nothing more than an average bow-wow. Network TV executives have fooled our hero into thinking that he has cybernetically enhanced brawn. After Bolt has dealt with the villains and gone back to his trailer, the technicians step in and remove the debris. The dead and the wounded get up and brush themselves off. Network executives refuse to let Bolt out of his trailer for fear that he will discover the truth about himself. Nothing Bolt does is real; it’s the result of carefully staged special effects. You can see the resemblance between Bolt and the “Toy Story” character Buzz Lightyear. Everything changes radically for Bolt when two sarcastic cats lure him out of his trailer. During a frantic chase, Bolt traps himself accidentally in a box of pink Styrofoam that is shipped off to New York City. In the Big Apple, three moronic pigeons lead Bolt to a cynical, declawed, black alley cat, Mittens (Susie Essman of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”), and our deluded hero takes her hostage so that he can find Penny. Leashed together like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were in the 1958 civil rights thriller “The Defiant Ones,” Bolt drags a reluctant Mittens across America to Hollywood. Along the way, Bolt realizes that he is an ordinary mutt. He succumbs to hunger pangs and begs for scraps at an RV park in Ohio. Infinitely wiser than Bolt, Mittens helps the whelp make his transition from super dog to normal hound.

At the Ohio RV park, Bolt and Mittens encounter Rhino. Rhino (voiced by Mark Walton of “Chicken Little”) is an energetic hamster who rolls around in a transparent plastic exercise ball. His favorite pastime is watching TV with his sphere balanced on the remote control so he can channel surf. The clueless Rhino worships Bolt as the super hero of his dreams and accompanies Mittens and Bolt to Las Vegas where they dine off left over casino buffet food in dumpsters. Along the way, Bolt discovers the simple pleasures of riding with his head stuck out a window of a moving vehicle, his ears sailing in the breeze, with his tongue trailing from the corner of his muzzle like a pennant. Just as Bolt is ready to surrender to the brutal, harsh grind of everyday life, Rhino refuses to let his hero sink into self-pity. Actually, this highly strung little hamster steals the show once he joins them, especially in a scene where Bolt and he rescue Mittens from an animal pound.

The biggest problem with “Bolt” is its anticlimactic plot. Nothing after the electrifying first scene can match Bolt’s clash with Dr. Calico’s attack choppers and the phantom motorcyclists that blast away with missiles at our genetically-altered hero. The finale at the studio where Bolt finds that he has been replaced by a doggie double is particularly heartbreaking, but co-directors Howard and Williams don’t let us down. The animators do a splendid job of replicating Travolta’s facial expressions on the snout of the heroic canine and Travolta reads his lines with admirable restraint. Children should enjoy the antics of these talking animals, and the fantastic 3-D digital projection will knock the eyes out of the adults who are worried about surviving this 81-minute comedy without reward. Watching “Bolt” in any format other than 3-D is a waste of time.