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Dogstar (named after Sirius, the Dog Star) is an odd, reclusive artist and amateur astronomer who has spent most of his life in his bedroom drawing and gazing at the stars through the treasured telescope his father gave him as a child. At the beginning of the film, we meet his equally eccentric family: his loving hippie mother, his sister Cassiopeia, and his brother Astro, whose brash, hasty, outgoing personality is the complete opposite of his brother’s.
At his birthday dinner, Dogstar is introduced to Gabrielle, a free-spirited young woman whose smile and sparkling diamond nose ring capture Dogstar’s attention and heart. As Gabrielle struggles with a drug habit, she turns to Dogstar for solace and peace; at the same time, his growing love for her motivates him to leave the house for the first time to get her a new diamond ring after she pawns her first one for drug money. As these two draw closer together, Astro reveals Gabrielle’s secret to Dogstar, causing Gabrielle to run away and Dogstar to decide if he should go after her.
Content
I must say first of all that I’m not a fan of “quirky family/personality” movies; films that deal with peculiar, dysfunctional families –even in a comedic approach—just aren’t my cup of tea. However, I set aside my personal preferences when watching this film, and examined it on its own merit. There were several things I liked about the film, and several things I felt need some work.
One of the things I noticed immediately was the quality of the acting. All of the actors did a wonderful job portraying their characters, and were able to show the multi-dimensional nature of each one. (This can be even harder to do with eccentric characters.) Additionally, every actor was good. In some films, the main actors have the most talent while minor and supporting castmembers have weaker acting skills; in this film, the smaller characters’ acting was just as good as that of the main cast.
I also thought that the story and dialogue were well-written and flowed evenly from one scene to the next. The characters are multifaceted and the issues they struggle with are complex, particularly with Gabrielle and Dogstar.
There were parts of the story that confused me and seemed to have no apparent reason, most noticeably when Dogstar would abruptly change accents. His character is British-American, but at random moments, he switches first to a stupid-sounding Southern accent, then later a Scottish accent, and finally, French. There are no noticeable events that trigger this change in speech (e.g. being angry, ecstatic, etc.), so it’s extremely jarring and confusing when it happens. Other than that small issue, the content was quite good.
Visual Look
Dogstar was shot on unmatted16mm color film, which means it’s in full screen format. (Mattes are what convert normal 16mm and 35mm frames of film to the widescreeen aspect ratios of 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, as, unmatted, those film formats start out at approximately the same aspect ratio as your traditional TV, 4:3) Unmatted film looks strangely naked and tends to be used mostly on documentaries, so I felt that the choice to go unmatted in this narrative film was a bit strange.
The fact that it was shot on 16mm also means that it’s about twice as grainy as 35mm film (since the negative is approximately half the size). However, unlike the matte issue, I found that I actually really liked the graininess; it gave further texture and dimension to an already emotionally-charged story.
Shooting on color film is some filmmakers’ ultimate dream, and can be stunning… when done well. This is the eternal problem, because film is not only expensive, but it is a very fickle medium, especially when it comes to lighting. This seemed to be a recurring issue in this movie, and it showed up most noticeably in the color grading. One outdoor scene might have a normal-looking cast to it; the next outdoor scene might have a greenish tint, while still another is more blue. While this made artistic sense in some places (e.g. scenes in Dogstar’s room at night were almost always a heavy blue tint), these variations occurred in other places throughout the film with little or no consistency. This can be helped by using color correction and filters in Premiere Pro 2, Final Cut Pro, or After Effects to balance out the color from one scene to the next.
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