Marley & Me

Based on the novel by John Grogan, Marley & Me stars Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston who begin the film as the newly married Grogans who move from Michigan to Miami for work.  Both are journalists but John has ambitions beyond being a columnist as he wants to be a reporter.  However the first job he's offered is as a columnist at the Sun-Sentinel so he accepts and he and Jen move into their house with two incomes.   Wanting to delay the biological clock a little, John buys Jen a puppy for her birthday and she chooses the cheapest one - the 'clearance puppy' as she names it - before jetting off to cover a trial.
 
When the three-week weaning period is over John collects the dog and is trying to think of a name when Bob Marley starts playing on the car radio; Bob? Robert?, he wonders before settling on Marley who he quickly finds is not one to be left alone nor trusted with anything of value.  Marley will eat anything and then come back for seconds and thirds when proper dog food is on offer.  John's best friend is the ultra-macho single guy Sebastian whose reporting for the New York Times would put both Woodward and Bernstein to shame - when he's not chasing off to Columbia to investigate the drug trade and bumping into Pablo Escobar, he's talking to drug runners somewhere else exotic and getting front pages.  All John has is a weekly column that soon begins telling topical news stories with a personal edge, many of which involve Marley.
 
Following a miscarriage, the Grogans go for a honeymoon in Ireland where Jen conceives the first of their three children that grow up with Marley during a move to Boca and then another to Philadelphia when John lands a job at the Inquirer.  All this time, Marley is 'the worst dog in the world', urinating when and where he shouldn't, getting thrown out of obedience school and terrorising the dogsitter.
 

 
I have to admit going into this with the lowest possible expectations, all of which it met.  Although Scott Frank and Don Roos are writers with a certain amount of pedigree (boom boom!) they don't seem to know what they want this film to be.  It is a romantic film, a rom-com, a slacker movie, a drama, a tearjerker and a family film and they use a scattergun approach to try and hit every marker along the way.  As such it feels incredibly disjointed as you're never sure what sort of film you're watching.  Not helping matters is the fact that Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, both fine comedic actors but out of their depth in a dramatic element, have absolutely no chemistry and don't look like a natural couple that would dare to be intimate in an Irish B&B with myriad Catholic iconography on the walls.  With the film having a fourteen-year timespan, neither Wilson nor Aniston look in their late twenties at the beginning nor in their early forties at the end as it seems all that's been done is a change in wardrobe - they don't physically look any older!
 
I guess most people know the ending but I won't mention it here but needless to say I felt it was mawkish and manipulative and they may as well have had little signs popping up saying 'cry now' and 'are you crying yet?  What do you mean, 'no'!'
 

 
Anyone who's had a pet probably has many fond memories of them - I had a guinea pig and fondly remember playing with it - but there is the flipside where the animal dies and breaks your heart.  Mine did the day before I started secondary school - talk about timing!  Marley & Me wants to be the film that shows you the joys of having a pet as long as it's a dog - all the extra features and John Grogan's final monologue are all dog-related.
 
Needless to say, I hated this but I haven't heard a bad word from anyone else who's seen it so what do I know?  It's obviously not for me.

The Disc

 
Extra Features
There is a Dog Training Trivia Track which can be incorporated into the film or watched separately and I braved the seventeen minutes of content before giving up half way through.  This is only of interest to people who have a puppy or are thinking of getting a puppy as there is plenty of advice of what to do with a puppy. If you don't have or want a puppy then this is useless.  Each short segment is introduced with a title seemingly drawn on a chalk board in the style of a child to give it that cutesy edge but that just grated - lower case 'i's should have a dot on the top, not a circle.
 
There are five dog-related featurettes looking at the training that went into preparing the 20-odd dogs for the film, talking about working with dogs and children, how to teach a dog to cock its leg but not urinate for the purposes of one brief insert shot, how and why to get a dog from a rescue shelter and an abysmal 'doggy cam' feature with subtitles showing what the dog actors are really saying.  Horrible.
 
In addition there's a gag reel that's not really a gag reel and over 25 minutes of deleted scenes with optional commentary by director David Frankel. 

NB:  Most of these features are exclusive to the Blu-ray Disc and the DVD is pretty thin when it comes to special features. 
 

 
The Picture
Marley & Me looks great and has a top notch high-definition transfer with vibrant colours, good contrast levels and excellent skin tones.  The dogs look suitably hairy (as do the hirsute leads) and the definition is fantastic - the beaches in Florida look wonderful and there is great detail in the interior shots.
 
*The pictures contained in this review are for illustrative purposes only and do not reflect the image quality of the disc.*
 
The Sound
A very nice and crisp DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack which begins with Shiny Happy People by REM and even incorporates The Verve's Lucky Man, both of which sound fantastic in HD surround sound!  The dialogue is clear and easy to make out and the score is as scattergun as the writing, upbeat one minute and downbeat the next, adding to the film's schizophrenic nature.
 
There are plenty of other audio and subtitle options in different languages.
 

 
Final Thoughts
I wasn't expecting to like Marley & Me and I didn't but it has received some pretty good critical reviews and I haven't met anyone else who has a bad word to say about it.  If you've already seen and enjoyed this and have young children then this disc will be perfect as you can watch the film together and then they'll appreciate the extra features.

This is a horribly mawkish and manipulative film; I am sure people will tell me I'm wrong, but I'm not.