Date: Fri 06-Sep-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: SHANNO

Illustration: C

Location: A10

Quick Words:

Playing-dogs-Twister-summer

Full Text:

(How dogs tied in to summer movies for Now Playing column, 9/6/96)

Now Playing-

Summer's Movies Went To The Dogs!

By Trey Paul Alexander III

Now that Labor Day has come and gone, school is back in session and vacations

are winding down, let's take a few moments to ponder over what this summer

offered moviegoers across the country.

Considering that the two top money-makers of the season were Independence Day

and Twister , one might conclude this was the summer of oohs and ahhs, when

special effects wizards ruled as the MVPs of Hollywood's most prolific time of

year. The dazzlingly realistic sights of terrifying tornadoes and antagonistic

aliens must surely signify the summer of `96. But let me submit another

theory: Summer `96 went to the dogs!

When Warner Bros. got the jump on all the other studios by releasing Twister

on May 10, weeks before the typical Memorial Day/summer movie kick-off

weekend, it unveiled both a smash hit film and an intriguing, recurring motif.

On several occasions during the summer, filmmakers used the tactic of

endangering man's best friend in order to put an emotional exclamation point

onto a tense scene. Canines have always been scene-stealers in the movies, but

rarely do I recall them having such climactic moments as they did in this

summer's flicks.

Twister opens with a pivotal flashback sequence in which we witness Jo (Helen

Hunt's character), as a little girl, running with her parents from the wrath

of a devastating tornado. Although the point of this scene is to show us the

fury of the twister and how it took the life of Jo's father, the lasting

memory is of Jo's dog and his frantic flight to catch up to his family, who

has holed up in a shelter to seek solace from the storm. When the dog finally

makes it and Jo's father opens the door to let him in - just in time, of

course - the crowd roars in approval.

But Twister is not done there. It offers another sequence of four-legged

jeopardy when catastrophe strikes the house of Jo's Aunt Meg. A twister levels

Aunt Meg's home and leaves her and her dog stranded inside the house with the

walls about to collapse at any moment. Aunt Meg is carried to safety, but the

scene's most triumphant moment is when Bill (Bill Paxton) emerges with a

bashful dog in his arms. Humans are important, but if you want to add oomph to

a scene, end with an unharmed canine!

Independence Day takes this saying to heart during one of its scenes of mass

destruction. As aliens lay some of Earth's greatest cities to waste, the film

focuses on a few characters to help make the annihilation more intimately

felt. Two of those, a stripper (Viveca Fox) and her young son, are seen

fleeing from a consuming fireball roaring through the streets of Los Angeles.

The scene's climax comes not when the woman and their boy reach shelter, but

when their dog, trailing behind them just as his fellow canine did in Twister

, evades the firestorm and joins them in safety.

Lastly, the more somber drama A Time To Kill also plays this game of peril

with the wet-nosed animals. When Jake (Matt McCoughnahue), the protagonist

defending the black man in a racially heated case, finds his home has been

burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan, his greatest sorrow is the apparent

death of his dog, who was alone in the house. As Jake sifts through the ruins,

vainly calling for his pet, his attorney friend (Oliver Platt) begs him to

quit the case and admit defeat. Echoing Jake's resilience and refusal to give

in, his dog suddenly emerges from the underbrush, unharmed, if not a little

soot stained. After such canine bravery, you know Jake must go on!

What does this all mean? Well, probably not much more than coincidence, and

certainly not a conspiracy to give dogs all the best scenes. But it does make

you wonder about the depth of some of these celluloid characters when the

filmmakers are left to turn to dogs, as lovable though they are, to draw the

most sentiment from an audience.