‘My Dog Skip’ explores special childhood bond

MY DOG SKIP. Directed by Jay Russell. Written by Gail Gilchriest, based on the book by Willie Morris. Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG.

Jay Russell’s “My Dog Skip” speaks to anyone who has known the special bond that exists between a beloved dog and its owner.

It’s shamelessly sentimental, but in this case, the sentimentality works. Throughout, Russell wisely counters his film’s sentiment and elegiac moments of 1940s Americana with strong, understated performances that give “Skip” a weight it otherwise might have lacked.

Set in a small Mississippi town during the summer of 1942, the film is a nostalgic trip back into a neatly mythologized past. It follows Willie Morris (Frankie Muniz from Fox television’s “Malcolm in the Middle”), an unpopular boy whose present and future happiness revolve around his relationship with Skip, a powerhouse of a Jack Russell terrier who not only gives Willie the companionship others won’t, but who also sparks the lives of everyone he meets.

If the film is about the unconditional love shared between a boy and his dog, it’s also about its human relationships; in this case, Willie’s relationship with his mother, Ellen (Diane Lane), and his strained relationship with his father, Jack (Kevin Bacon), a distant man who lost his leg is World War I, and also “a piece of his heart.”

The film loses its way in its subplots — there’s one about moonshining that has no place here — but as family entertainment, “My Dog Skip” is an old-fashioned film about values and morals and the way life used to be that works in spite of its melodrama.

What will kids hooked on Pokemon and PlayStation make of this film? If they’ve ever had a dog, been picked on in school, or had difficulty with their parents, they should love it.

Grade: B+

EYES WIDE SHUT. On DVD and video. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, written by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael. Running time: 159 minutes. Rated R.

It isn’t often that one imagines polite society taking part in a masked orgy, but in this, Stanley Kubrick’s 13th and final feature film, that’s the case.

Still, contrary to the hype and controversy that swirled about that scene, Nicole Kidman’s nude scenes, and the fact that she and her husband, Tom Cruise, are intimate together on screen, director Kubrick, who orchestrated all of this from a 1926 Viennese novella by Arthur Schnitzler, may have orchestrated it decades too late. Indeed, there is little in “Eyes” that will shock today’s audiences, some of who saw more skin and sexual gymnastics in 1980’s “Caligula.” Or on any season of “Melrose Place.”

On one level, Kubrick’s inability to shock robs his film of its intended emotional impact, but his film nevertheless has its strokes of genius. It understands that a measure of illusion is necessary to keep even the best relationships afloat, and that when those illusions are threatened, such as with the truth, the core of those relationships can be hurled into a tailspin.

Structured as a thriller, the film stars Kidman and Cruise, two actors with enough pull to lift this cerebral, languorous, yet multi-layered and absolutely adult film out of a cinematic mainstream teaming with teen angst, sexual uncertainty and dirty jokes.

Its selling point is sex, but unlike many recent commercial films, it never trivializes sex because the clinical and emotionally removed Kubrick wisely understands and respects its ramifications, dangers and importance.

At 159 minutes, the film is too long and the performances from Cruise and Kidman are sometimes too measured and stiff — but that isn’t entirely their fault. In his quest for perfection, Kubrick demanded — and got — his actors to reshoot each scene dozens of times. It shows. There is a rigidity to the performances that may not have been there had Kubrick entertained a looser vision and trusted his stars to act, at least in part, from their souls.

Still, “Eyes Wide Shut” works on so many levels so successfully, it demands several viewings to fully appreciate the mind working behind it. Stanley Kubrick had a respect for film as an art form that’s missing in today’s films. He was an intellectual with an eye forever cast toward the commercial. That the bedroom was his final comment on the world seems fitting. Who better than Kubrick to help us understand one of the greatest mysteries of all?

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”