Starts off brilliant. We care about the kid. His mother tries to hide the reality of dog spading by telling him something much worse, and it involved going bald which the boy had suffered from. How sick is that beneath the surface? Its good. The boy is a sponge and accepts all around him yet is curious. His dad is both caring for the boy but cold towards the dog. Interesting enough. The dog is locked in small cage in a big house. It's a great environment. The family seem rich so why not build a kennel? The dialogue is psychologically rich.
The problem starts when the dog is in the life of Dawn Weiner. The same Dawn from Welcom To The Dollhouse, which I oike a lot. Here we just don't invest in her. There is no dynamic with the other characters. Worse of all the sombreness is forced on us instead of coming from character development or plot. For example there is a Mexican band who just appear so depressed and just stand about frozen for the purpose of being sad. Why bother? There is no light with the dark. This why Todd Solandz movies with comedy work better. This all seems jolted together. The way Brandon tells his brother about his father's death is ineffective. It should have been an important moment but it's not acted well enough and there is no build up. Some tension before would have been better. It's not even shot well sometimes.
Then an intermission with a running dog to music? Is this movie a parody and I'm missing something? Is it the Littleist Hobo on acid?
Danny Devito's character Dave enters and yep he looks depressed. No suprise. How many movies have struggling script writers in them? It shouldn't bother me but the movie has to win me back at this point. Devito does a decent job playing a guy who wants some recognition so dumbed down his work to see if that worked. A guy who kind of admits he may not be a good writer at heart and has wasted his time trying. This part of the movie seems to dig at writers and film making. Dave is an old style writer with his 'what ifs' for ideas and the new kids are looking for something just edgy and self-absorbed for ego. They dont respect Dave. This part of the movie is OK. Dave's part of the movie ends with a 'then what'? I liked that connection. Cheesy but some fun at least.
The last part has some heartless and selfish characters including an urban artist who claims he's no Damien His yet ends up displayed a dead dog at an exhibition. Maybe a dig at modern art? Nothing relatable or engrossing.

What about the dog in this movie? In the first part we see how he fills an emotional void and has his own relationship with the characters. In the rest he's kind of second place or irrelevant. Some people get upset at the dog being killed. I don't see the issue. People die in movies all the time and nobody cares. Dogs do get run over. It's not a real dog being killed.

Todd is one of the best film makers around (or was) but this isn't a good effort.

Going in I knew certain people took major issue with the subject of some of the movie's jokes: Rape, animal cruelty, depression, death, and domestic terrorism to name a few. Personally I took issue with the fact that I was bored.

A black-comedy anthology film starring a Dachshund seemed like it would be totally my cup of tea. In reality, _Wiener-Dog_ couldn't hold my attention through even the first segment, and I didn't laugh once.

_Final rating:★½: - Boring/disappointing. Avoid if possible._

**A dog's lifetime journey with the different owners.**

I am an animal lover, but there's nothing bad I found on it. It was just a film and they did not even harm the dogs that used for, but those, particularly final scene was a graphic. Anyway, one thing is for sure that this is not for softhearted people. Because some of the contents were unpleasant to watch, but in the real world these things happen everyday, everywhere and nobody doing nothing to stop that. So you can't just blame this film for that to portraying the facts. In a recent film, someone was attacked by a bear and later it was killed, but this is not that kind of bad impression giving film for the animal lovers.

I haven't seen the 'Welcome to the Dollhouse', but it is a spin-off of that. Written and directed by a same filmmaker. A comedy drama with multiple layers, but all of them follows a single dog, the journey what a dog makes in his lifetime like with the different owners how its fate hangs. So you aren't going to enjoy all the tale, I particularly liked first one and so do the many others. The second half was not up to its counterpart. It started off well and if it had ended the same way, it would have been considered a good one. But it lost the track during the middle, so now it is an average, maybe just below that.

Don't think it is a dog film like those you loved. The dog is the part of the film, but its contributions were rare. It is just a film and enjoy it as one, other than that it is useless to complain on the depiction. It is R rated, and that tells it might not suitable for families. But it carried a very good message on how the dogs were treated in the different classes, in the different society of people and family. For that alone, it is worth a watch, but still lacks appealness. So I won't suggest it, but it is not bad either like many people claiming. All I would say is choose it carefully, don't believe what some were whining about.

_5/10_