Red Dog Dingo

I queued up Red Dog (2012) on a recommendation from a friend of Ms. Spenser. I didn't realize that I was setting up a small ANZAC film festival, after the last movie we saw. There were dogs in that one too.

This starts with a trucker pulling into a motel in a small west Australian town of Dampier. Finding nobody in the office, he heads over to the bar, where he finds a few men trying to shoot a sick dog - but they can't do it. The proprietor pulls him a beer and starts to tell him the story of Red Dog, the most famous dog in Australia, maybe the world. 

He tells about moving to Dampier with his wife and finding Red Dog in the middle of the road. They picked him up, but his farts were so smelly, they had to move him to the back of the pickup. In Dampier, he became nobody and anybody's dog. It's a company town full of lonely and isolated men, and Red Dog made them all feel a little better. 

The movie starts slowly, with different people taking over the story as the locals arrive at the bar. Some tell little stories, some longer. We get to know some of these men (almost all are men). Finally, they get to the story of Jack (Josh Lucas), the man that Red Dog decided was his owner. It's a fun story, and a romantic one, because Jack also meets, woos and wins Rachel Taylor.

This is a sweet, sentimental movie - maybe not all that deep. It's mostly about the manly men of Australia, with lots of mateship and union pride, but not a lot of women, and only one visible but non-speaking part for an aboriginal Australian. But that's a different movie, not the one they wanted to make. This one is about a town full of men and the dog they loved - and the one man the dog loved. We loved it.