Copyright Forge BooksWin a copy of the endearing book that inspired this week’s movie release, A Dog’s Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron!
Send an email to moviemom@moviemom.com with Dog in the subject line and tell me your favorite pet. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only) I will pick a winner at random on February 3, 2017.
Interview: W. Bruce Cameron, Author of “A Dog’s Purpose”
Posted on January 23, 2017 at 3:47 pm
Copyright Forge Books“A Dog’s Purpose,” in theaters this week, is a love letter to dogs and the people who are lucky enough to be loved by them. A dog named Bailey loves a boy and then, as he dies and is reborn as other dogs, he becomes an important part of the lives of others as well. Dennis Quaid stars as the man who reunites with Bailey in his new form after many years.
We agreed that it is a challenge to find the right name for a dog. He said “you have to wait for the personality to assert itself. Of course that means that you call the dog ‘Hey, puppy!’ and the dog thinks its name is Puppy. My dog Tucker came with the name already stuck on him and it was a perfect name for him. I can’t imagine calling him anything else. As long as you fall in love with the dog, the name is going to be fine.” Tucker was a rescue dog. He was abandoned as a newborn in a box outside of the animal shelter. “My daughter, who runs an animal rescue was called because this was a death row case. Three newborn puppies would have overwhelmed the resources of the shelter. So, they asked her if she could help out, and she happened to have a lactating German shepherd whose puppies had weaned the day before. So she brought in these three puppies that were still slick from being born and said, ‘Hey, remember that wild weekend at the Sigma Chi house?’ and presented her with the puppies. I took him over when he was seven or eight weeks old. She was in Denver and we were in LA so I told her we were not going to come get the dog and she said, ‘I’ll be there on Wednesday.’ Her goal in life is that if you don’t have a dog, she will make sure you get one, and if you have one, she will persuade you to get another one. And if you’re allergic to dogs, she will get you a cat.”
He had dogs when he was growing up, starting at age 8, the same age as the boy in the book. “None of the kids in the neighborhood had dogs. My dad walked in that labrador and we started running together and rolling around together like we found each other after years apart. And then suddenly some of the other people in the neighborhood started getting dogs, too. Pretty soon we were overrun with them. So I always had dogs and our friends had dogs, and our dog needed a friend so we got Gypsy and she needed a friend. So most of my teenage years we had three dogs.”
He loves hearing from people about their dogs. “The Dog’s Purpose premise has gotten me so many emails and comments from people who say that their dog is so much like one they had when they were young or years before that it seems like the truth. The idea that you would come across an old friend later in life.” But he does not have any tips for training a dog. “Tucker is Exhibit A for showing that I don’t know how to train a dog. He’ll agree to some things. He’s the only dog I’ve ever owned who is willing to stay. On the other hand, if I throw a ball and tell him to bring it back, he will run after it and sniff it and look at me as if to say, ‘Why are you throwing this perfectly good ball away?’ I think I’m good at training dogs, but none of my dogs agree with me on that.”
The search for purpose for a dog he says, “is just the search for the right person. That’s their ultimate purpose. But they have another purpose, too. They are so joyous and so happy to be with you. If you want to go for a walk, they’re happy to go wherever you want to go, they’re happy to come back from the walk. With the exception of a bath, they’re happy to do whatever you want to do. If you come back from taking out the trash, they’re happy to see you. And they’re with us such a short period of time and don’t seem depressed about that. The lesson of that is that we should live like the dogs. We should have every day be joyous. My advice to anybody including myself is if you’re going through a bad period and you just can’t see the world’s on your shoulders and no day is a good day, you’re missing the whole point of the experience. And that’s something dogs know from the moment they come bounding up to you as a puppy.”
Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, by Robert Matzen
Posted on December 21, 2016 at 2:43 pm
Copyright Paladin 2016Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe by Robert Matzen, tells the story of the extraordinary war service of the man we all know as the genial actor who always seemed to exemplify American values. He seldom spoke about his combat missions, so the stories of his war service in this book are new and the impact that experience had are critical in understanding his body of work. the first in-depth look at Stewart’s life as a Squadron Commander in the skies over Germany, and, his return to Hollywood the changed man who embarked on production of America’s most beloved holiday classic, reflecting his more sober, complex, but still hopeful view of the world, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Matzen sifted through thousands of Air Force combat reports and the Stewart personnel files; interviewed surviving aviators who flew with Stewart; visited the James Stewart Papers at Brigham Young University; flew in the cockpits of the B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator; and walked the earth of air bases in England used by Stewart in his combat missions of 1943-45. If he had not been an Oscar-winning actor, we would still recognize him as a war hero.
The introduction by film scholar Leonard Maltin notes:
It’s a Wonderful Life was a challenging project for him and his director, Frank Capra. Both of them had been reshaped by the war and were understandably nervous about resuming their careers. It is fitting that Matzen bookends his story by describing Stewart’s return to the world of make-believe that this job represented in 1946.
This is not to say that he was a one-trick pony in the 1930s and early 40s. His earnestness was his stock in trade, but he reveals a comedic cynicism in The Shop Around the Corner and an unexpected sophistication in The Philadelphia Story, which earned him his only Academy Award.
But It’s a Wonderful Life calls on him to express a range of emotions he had never tapped into before. After all, here is a man so overcome by despair and the feeling of failure that he tries to commit suicide. The scene in which he breaks down while sitting at Nick’s Bar was so draining that the actor begged his director not to make him do it a second time. After the first take, Capra wanted to do another and have his camera push in toward Stewart; he accomplished the effect with a laboratory blowup instead.
This meticulously researched book provides important insights into one of the finest actors — and, as we now know, one of the finest combat pilots, in history.
Featuring almost 1000 images and over 350 pages, The Art of Jay Ward Productions provides the ultimate overview of the Jay Ward studio from its early inception through its many fondly remembered cartoon shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-right, Fractured Fairy Tales, George of the Jungle and Super Chicken, plus animated commercials for products like Cap’n Crunch and Quisp & Quake.
Audible presents Richard Armitage (“The Hobbit”) reading a spellbinding novel version of the world’s most famous tragic love story, Romeo and Juliet, adapted by David Hewson. Armitage says, “I think Romeo and Juliet is the greatest, most tragic love story ever told. What David Hewson did with this script is so exciting to me. I really love the fact that he followed avenues that Shakespeare suggested but didn’t necessarily detail in depth. If you want to immerse yourself in a warm bath of Garganega and the heat of Verona and hear a brilliant story about a young woman who is challenging the restraints of her time, listen to this audiobook, which has romance, poetry, politics, and humor to spare.”
