The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

Max is a lucky dog and he knows it.  He has a place to live and a human that he loves and that loves him back.  That’s why he’s surprised when his owner, Katie, brings home a new dog, Duke.  Duke seems friendly at first, but eventually takes a liking to his new home…and Max’s bed.  Max is adamantly against this intruder, but this is an animated movie.  While Max and Duke can communicate with each other in English, Katie hears nothing but barking.   Max’s complaints go nowhere.

Max has an idea, though.  He can damage enough of Katie’s vases so that Duke looks bad.  Duke gives in, but has an idea of his own.  He finds a weakness in the fence of a dog park.  It would be simple enough to abandon Max somewhere in the city.  Duke would have the apartment all to himself.  What Duke doesn’t count on is a gang of cats stealing their collars and leaving them for animal control to deal with.

Both dogs are put in the truck with a third dog.  Just when it looks like neither is going home, Snowball comes to the rescue.  Well, to the rescue of the third dog, specifically.  It turns out that Snowball and his cohorts hate humans.  Max and Duke agree with the rhetoric to get Snowball to spring them, as well.  You see, Snowball leads a gang of abandoned pets called The Flushed Pets.  All of the animals had homes until they didn’t.  Snowball, for instance, was a magician’s rabbit until the human found another job, making Snowball unnecessary.  Since many of the other animals would be considered exotic pets, it’s presumable that the others have similar stories.

Back home, Max’s friends band together to rescue Max.  They’re led by Gidget, who seems to have a small crush on Max.  She even enlists the aid of a hawk named Tiberius.  The adventure takes all three parties across Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Max and Duke even search for Duke’s previous owner.

You might wonder why I would give away so much information about a movie.  I think most adults won’t be surprised.  I’m not saying that the movie is formulaic.  It’s just that it does follow a certain pattern that I’ve seen before.  You have one character leading a nice, comfortable life.  That life is disrupted by an unwelcome newcomer who inadvertently sets them off on some wild ride.  There is at least clear threat, usually more, as the two characters face danger at every turn.  (In this case, Max and Duke have to worry about animal control and The Flushed Pets.)   While that adversary isn’t a great threat, there will be one life-threatening, paradigm-shifting situation that will cause the first character and the newcomer to become friends.

The movie is still entertaining.  It’s exactly the kind of movie that would be safe for kids and enjoyable by the parents that have to bring them.  There are a few dangerous situations for the characters.  Max and Duke are faced with the choice of being attacked by The Flushed Pets or a long fall into unclean water.  There are one or two scenes where their lives are in real danger, but it’s a comedy.  There’s no real expectation that Max and Duke won’t go home.  In fact, it’s exactly the kind of ending you could get a sequel out of.  I just hope that this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

IMDb page

The Invention of Lying (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

Could you imagine a world with no lying?  This would be a world  where no one would know how to say something that wasn’t true.  Words like ‘true’ and ‘lie’ wouldn’t even exist.  Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson imagined such a world.  They wrote The Invention of Lying, in which Gervais plays Mark Bellison.

In Mark’s world, things are basically the same.  They still have movies, corrupt police officers and attractive women.  It’s just that since there is no lying, there’s no fiction.  Since there’s no fiction, all movies are documentaries.  When I say documentary, I mean some guy sitting in front of a camera telling the audience what happened.  Police officers will still take an occasional bribe, but are totally honest about their motives.

Things aren’t going so well for Mark.  He’s attracted to a woman, Anna, who doesn’t reciprocate.  He has a job writing movies about a century no one cares about, leading to his termination.  His termination leads to his being evicted.  His being evicted leads to an epiphany.  When he goes to close out his bank account, the system is down.  He has to give the teller a dollar amount, which Mark realizes can be any dollar amount. It doesn’t have to be the actual dollar amount, so he chooses the amount he owes his landlord.  When the system comes back up and the teller sees the correct amount, the teller thinks it’s a computer mistake.

Mark then realizes that he can do this as much as he wants.  The best part is that no one will suspect anything.  Since he’s the only one that knows what a lie is, people should act like the teller.  Mark goes into a casino and lies about winning.  He can claim to win the jackpot on every machine and the casino will never think to ask Mark any questions.  He can also go up to random women and tell them that the fate of the world depends on them having sex right now.  (This does lead to some sense of guilt, especially where Anna is concerned.)

Things get complicated when his mother is dying.  She’s scared, which is natural.  Mark doesn’t want this, so he invents a story about going to a great place in the sky where she’ll be loved.  He doesn’t think much of it, but an employee of the nursing home overhears him.  She passes the story along and before long, Mark has a following.  Mark doesn’t really want the attention.  The story was only for his mother’s benefit.  The rest of the movie deals with the snowball effect that results.  People want to know more about this Great Man in the Sky, so Mark has to make stuff up on the fly.

There’s something interesting about a world without lying.  As I said, there’s not so much as fiction or even lying in advertising.  Mark’s mother isn’t at a nursing home.  She’s in A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People.  Could you imagine what it would be like to be able to lie?  Even when Mark explains lying, people still can’t wrap their heads around it.  (That was the one thing I wondered about.  There should at least be terms for accurate and inaccurate, so a lie could be described as knowingly saying something inaccurate.)

The movie is safe for teenagers and up.  There are a few sexual jokes, some involving masturbation.  Mar’s Man in the Sky parallels religion.  The humor really isn’t meant to poke fun at religion.  Instead, it says more about how things get out of hand quickly.  Something that starts with the best of intentions becomes a major organization similar to what we would call a church.  Some of the things seem absurd, like Mark’s story where everything came from.  Then again, who is anyone to question Mark?  It would never enter their minds to think that he’s lying or might be crazy, as far out as it seems.

That was the one thing that I found odd.  I would think that in thousands of years of recorded history, someone would make a mistake or would be mentally unbalanced and say something that wasn’t true.  Is everyone totally accurate in this world?  One inaccuracy would present the opportunity to realize that you can deliberately make a mistake.  It wasn’t a big deal, overall.  It was a funny movie.  I’d recommend renting it. 

IMDb page