Rijndri
Load of rubbish!!
Arianna Moses
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
jcappy
Dog Days 7 Alpha Dogs "Dog Days" may employ hot humid summer days to express a grim and atomized social reality, but it more effectively, intentionally or not, turns to the microwave heat of male sexuality to express an even grimmer reality of violations and violence. In "Dog Days," DE Sade is not dead.The question is: what is its director's stance? Is "Dog Days" a rebuke of men's abuse and use of women? Is it an expression of content which may raise a few questions? Or, does it accept, given the hot weather and the heat generated by male sexuality, the normalcy of such raw force? My take is that Seidl settles for ambiguity. For one, the resistance position is not an option for him, because he can and does use his camera as an accomplice in male sexual abuse. This is most evident in the prolonged sadistic scene involving the teacher and her porn-head boyfriend. Here Seidl chooses pornography over implication, thus aligning himself with the victimizer over the victim. In a sense Seidl is like his character, the salesman, Hrubl, who is disturbed by his role in the rape of the hitch-hiker, but perhaps because his escape hatch is a room filled with porn, cannot muster the will not stop it. But, ironically, this is a scene in which Seidl himself chooses only to indicate rape, proving that he understands how his camera can compound crime.Seidl also extends too much sympathy to his men, all of whom are guilty of various levels of misogyny. While his female characters are mainly pacified, silent, and one dimensional, the men who sell them out are given more latitude, action, and centrality, which in turn makes them more worthy of consideration. In other words, the victims are bound by duty and love, and locked up in involuntary lives; whereas the men who ooze contempt for them get to display freedom and "human" markings.This makes for a convenient circularity because it refuses to point to the agent of an exploitative, power-linked sexuality. Seidl cannot judge them, monsters as some of them are, because he himself is drenched in masculine assumptions. One might say that his unflinching view reveals men, but his hard look softens before their acts.When Lucky, the porn-head's buddy, returns to apologize to the teacher he says "I'm sorry that you had to take sh-t yesterday because of the sins of all women," adding that his participation in her unrelenting degradation was both a pleasure and a valuable experience--and no doubt a pumping up of his male identity. Whether Seidl hears all this as a galling reversal or a wrong-headed apology isn't that clear, but lines such as these make it obvious that Seidl is immersed in the arena of sexual politics.There are other indications of Seidl's stand throughout the film. As the opening credits roll, the camera espies several sun bathers--all have unnoticeable or shapeless bodies except for two model-like topless young women. He extends this same type of bodily exception to the bar dancer, whose waif-like, sexually-charged figure serves as a kind of exclamation point in a slowly evolving film. Then there is the swing scene that subtly eroticizes the plain hitch-hiker as a kind of foreshadowing of her rape.In sum, when it comes to sex objectification Seidl seems to follow the lead of his male-ordered culture.. He cannot critique women as male property because of an equivocation which seems to start with his invasive camera (remember the porn-head walks right into the teacher's apt) and ends up affecting his judgment. Give him credit for revealing male sexual aggression, fail him for refusing to connect criminal acts to their male agents. A blurb on the DVD describes "Dog Days" as "strangely entertaining." Which begs the question: FOR WHOM?
fred3f
If you are looking for a film the portrays the pointless and boring existence of middle class lives caught in a web of non-communication and false ideals, then this is the film for you. If you also what the film to be engaging and keep your interest, then you should probably look elsewhere. There are many films that do this far better. For example, try some of the darker films by Bergman. The Filmmaker felt that in order to show the spiritual poverty of the middle class he should subject the viewer to one agonizingly dull and vacuous incident after another until the film finally comes to its tortuous and pathetic end. If you value your time there are far better ways to spend two hours, like cleaning your house, for example.
wombat_1
What an appalling piece of rubbish!!! Who ARE all these people who blubber on about how good this is? Yes, it's "arty"; and yes, it's "foreign", but .... that's not enough. The plot is boring and disjointed, like a reality show but not so slickly made.The people are intrinsically uninteresting; but as characters they don't have enough depth to feel empathy for them. If they are based on real people then I feel very, very sorry for them.The violence (and some of it is very violent) seems quite ostentatious and gratuitous. It's like the producer has visions of being Quenton Tarantino. Not that I think very much of him, either.And oh yes: if I had neighbours like these, I'd move!
anatolvitouch
This film is great. As often heard, it is indeed very realistic and sometimes brutal, but unlike some other people I am clearly not of the opinion that it is depressing, negativistic or dismantling Austria as a proto-fascist society. Quite the contrary: While there are indeed some very heavy scenes in HUNDSTAGE and some characters are to be called very bad persons, at the same time you watch love, beauty and humor in Ulrich Seidls film. And that's exactly what distinguishes HUNDSTAGE for me from other films that try to show the lives of the 'ordinary people' in an intense, realistic way; their hustle, their wishes, their dark sides: Seidl clearly never tries to prove, that the lives of the working-class people are trash! In my opinion, viewers who come to this conclusion seem to be very afraid of admitting, that nearly nobody's live is as 'clean' and 'normal' as we would like other people to believe. And that every live has its dark and often depressing sides. The most beautiful scene: The old Viennese man, watching his old girl dancing 'the oriental way', as he is calling it. I think everybody who finds this scene ugly lacks a sense of beauty and should ask themselves what it is, that's proto-fascist: The characters in HUNDSTAGE or viewers, who are turned off by the body of a 70+ year old woman, dancing with all her charms for her lover.
