Marley And Me

Not quite sure how I ended up watching this film, about a Labrador who moves in with a young couple and gradually destroys their lives. Or enriches their lives. Or something. The most powerful association I have with Marley And Me is an anecdote from Bobs about her young nephew who, on being asked if he found the film too upsetting, crowed: 'I'm playing with my penis!'

They should put that on the cover of the DVD.

Maybe I'm watching in order to find out what the upsetting thing in the film is. It turns out, not too surprisingly, that it's the death of the dog. Oh, wow. A dog gets old and dies. It took the running time (more or less) of Bela Tarr's Damnation to tell us this?

You would have thought that, since Marley's alleged 'charm' seems to rest mainly on his capacity for acts of extreme domestic vandalism, they'd be glad to see the back of him. But it seems that his ability to eat an answering machine whole makes him the canine equivalent of Einstein. If this couple bring up their kids with the same attention to detail they give to the dog, they'll be selling their bodies on the streets for crack by age ten, and who will be laughing at their giddy antics? Apart from me, that is.