Dog Days

Trailers of this movie may show scenes of violence or non mainstream sexuality, but these scenes are just rare fragments, picked out to attract audience. They are, of course showing the main message of the movie:

People who are constantly kicked on their heads in their jobs and lives, using power, which they may have somewhere else, to notoriously oppress others. And at the low end of the oppression chain, mostly women.

A movie showing this as brutally as Hundstage is surely tough to face, but having to endure such lives, is even tougher.

Technically the film is much like Short Cuts, but consisting of documentary style episodes, featuring people like your neighbour, playing just the way they are. Without any glitter, and most disturbingly, without any hope. Its documentary style makes the movie even more disturbing, because you realize, such people are out there, and there are many of them, although our society focuses on the nice exterior looks. Somewhere the porn industry has to do its business, somewhere unreported domestic violence has to take place, somewhere hopes have to shatter. I sure do know such people.

If you want to see a movie without any funny scenes (some may think the handicapped woman repeating the top ten supermarkets is funny, but this happens for real) and without any melodramatic, go watch this movie. However it will lose when you are focusing on subtitles I fear, as subtitles can´t transport accentuation.

This austrian film is rather slow-paced and deals with everyday life's madness. A collection of 6 parallel "stories" - more like incidents from the most miserable people'e everyday life. It deeply reminded me of Michael Haneke's "71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" (1994), only this one is much more solid, more interesting and much more depressing.

Clearly, I film for the few people that can appreciate non-Hollywood event depiction and shooting and slow-pace at times. Certainly, not a pleasant experience this is a true original as films must be.

This film is great. As often heard, it is indeed very realistic and sometimes brutal, but unlike some other people I am clearly not of the opinion that it is depressing, negativistic or dismantling Austria as a proto-fascist society. Quite the contrary: While there are indeed some very heavy scenes in HUNDSTAGE and some characters are to be called very bad persons, at the same time you watch love, beauty and humor in Ulrich Seidls film. And that's exactly what distinguishes HUNDSTAGE for me from other films that try to show the lives of the 'ordinary people' in an intense, realistic way; their hustle, their wishes, their dark sides: Seidl clearly never tries to prove, that the lives of the working-class people are trash! In my opinion, viewers who come to this conclusion seem to be very afraid of admitting, that nearly nobody's live is as 'clean' and 'normal' as we would like other people to believe. And that every live has its dark and often depressing sides. The most beautiful scene: The old Viennese man, watching his old girl dancing 'the oriental way', as he is calling it. I think everybody who finds this scene ugly lacks a sense of beauty and should ask themselves what it is, that's proto-fascist: The characters in HUNDSTAGE or viewers, who are turned off by the body of a 70+ year old woman, dancing with all her charms for her lover.

It's nothing brilliant, groundbreaking or innovative, but 'Dog Days' is for some reason an extremely fascinating character study. It's like CRASH tripping on a bad dose of heroin, but not really. It's an Austrian film following the lives of several depressed, deranged and annoying people and their abusive relationships with each other. It's disturbing, yet very well-acted and it's interesting to watch the crazy little things these characters do. Certainly not for the weak-hearted, this highly pessimistic film offers no conclusion or revelation at the end, we just see the lives of these sordid individuals over the course of two days. Grade: B

An outstanding film by all accounts. Bleak, yes. Funny, yes. Shocking, yes. To all those reviewers harping on about lack of plot, then surely this is to miss the point. Seidl draws on his documentary background and indeed blends the this with the fictional elements. Do we really need the narrative signposts that we are force-fed in films. Life is not that black and white. I cannot understand the constant desire for fast paced cutting. Go and watch a commercial if you need to but leave the rest of us with well made, insightful films that speak about the bigger issues in life. This is a marvellous film that is disturbing and shocking but not in a gratuitous manner. I think it is in the tiny minutiae of life that these moments are revealed. I found the moment when the couple visit the grave and when the old woman does the striptease to be very moving. You need to look underneath the surface of the characters to see what makes them tick and Seidl has done this. As a result we have complex characters that seem too real for some viewers perhaps to stomach. I should stop defending the film. Just go and see it. Brilliant film-making.