The Dog

"I robbed this bank." T-shirt Dog wears in front of the infamous bank.

The Dog is a documentary tribute to the genius of Al Pacino. Although it's not at all about Pacino, his depiction of Brooklyn-Italian John Wojtowicz in Dog Day Afternoon, who robbed a branch bank in the summer of 1972 to fund the sex-change operation of his lover, was so spot on that, as eccentric and wild as John is, Pacino's performance was constantly on my mind.

The doc, filled with repetitive declamations from John about his willingness to chew up life, is most interesting for me briefly when his first wife, Carmen, hints that John may have robbed the Brooklyn bank because of debt to the mob, not just the sex change. Wish I could have seen that back-story because the film mostly lets John ramble on.

Alas, the film belongs to Republican Vietnam vet John, whose arc moves to and past his defining role in the botched robbery. While he claims to have married as many as four men, we watch him age in a manic pose, always talking, usually defending his bizarre bisexual exploits, seeming never to step out of his rebel role, fighting and eventually losing to cancer.

Even prison can't dull his enthusiasm for the bizarre sexuality that has been his signature. It is the '70's after all, when the Gay Activists Alliance was born. For John, it's a chance to find partners more than sympathy with the emerging Greenwich Village Stonewall initiative. The doc pays little attention to the actual robbery (I suppose it would be futile to try to match Sydney Lumet's superb film adaptation) and chooses to emphasize Dog's bravado and his close relationship with his mother, Terry (amateur psych sleuths can already smell Oedipus if not Freud). She is one tough little lady, enduring his increasingly strange actions with a love and equanimity suggesting she could also be the subject of a doc. It's doubtful how she could be held even partially responsible for a man who robs a bank and takes hostages.

Dog embodies self absorption and willful violation of civility that eventually make him much less likable than the odd Brooklyn punk he started out as. Thanks goodness for the archival news footage and Al Pacino.

Often very funny, occasionally quite sad documentary on the life and hard times of "The Dog", John Wojtowicz, the real life man played by Al Pacino in "Dog Day Afternoon" – the hapless bank robber who held up a NYC bank to pay for his lover's sex change operation and (first) to get her released from a psychiatric hospital.

Wojtowicz is affable and funny, completely un self-conscious about his rather insane life, his voracious, intense and sometimes confusing sexual and romantic appetites, his love of the spotlight. But there are also moments when we realize this likable eccentric does have a side that is closer to dangerously crazy and delusional than to simply 'off-beat' and that tension is one of the fascinating tears that run through the man and the film.

It's also clear that John to a certain extent is also playing the role of 'John' for the cameras, which adds to the humor of the film (he has a very funny habit of saying things like 'action' and 'cut' to the documentary camera that is filming him), but also asks deeper questions about fleeting fame and how it can distort one's personality and perceptions of self and reality.

Perhaps the most lovely thing about "The Dog" is how truly un-judgmental it seems. While it celebrates the humor in the absurdities of John's life story and his person (and those around him), it never feels like we're watching a freak show that sniggers at it's subjects from a distance. These may be odd people, but the film never seems to forget that they are people first and odd second, or that we're all odd in one way or another. I feel like the filmmakers genuinely liked John. It's a complex and rich portrait of a very unique man, sort of a hero, sort of a villain, sort of crazy, sort of scary, sort of wonderful.

I had never heard about John Wojtowicz but thanks to the movie The Dog, I know all about this icon. The documentary has several overlapping themes: the early days of the gay movement, how John became an icon of a robin hood of sorts, and how he was a man full of love. John was his own man and even the bank robbery he was involved in did not define him. A 1975 Oscar winning movie was based on his legendary bank robber staring Al Pacino called Dog Day in Afternoon. He was a convicted bank robber but his reason was noble. He was for robbing the bank in order to raise the money needed to fund his lover's sex change operation. John admits in the movie that he is over sexed, but his commentary captures a period where free love and Vietnam War clashed. America was in an identity crisis between the conservative g-men outlook and the free love and eventual disco 70s. It is honorable that John put the interest of his love Ernest Aron (later known as Elizabeth Debbie Eden) ahead of himself and just wanted her to be happy. John risk his life and even though it turned out to be a failed robbery, eventually the notoriety helped fund the operation. John, known as "the Dog", comes across sincere and as a noble character who always tried to do the right thing and how his big heart got in the way. In the end, the Dog makes no apologies for being who he is and he sums it best in his final thoughts, "Live everyday as if it's your last and whoever doesn't like it can go fcuk themselves and a rubber duck." Don't miss a chance to get the story behind the man that inspired Al Pacino's legendary role in the Oscar Nominated Dog Day Afternoon. The Dog is Directed by Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren and set to be release in NY and LA on August 8, 2014.

The true story of the real guy that Al Pacino made legendary in the bank robbing thriller Dog Day Afternoon...

The real guy, first name John, not Sonny, isn't playing with a full deck, and as he talks about going from a "warmonger" Goldwater conservative to a peacenik McCarthy democrat during and after the Vietnam war, first believing the war and later hating the war, he's forgetting that Goldwater lost to Johnson, and it was John F Kennedy and Johnson who started the Vietnam war, and Johnson who proudly sustained it, but, again, not a full deck here... and any chance a documentary can blame Republicans for everything, they'll do so...

Also, while he did kinda look like Pacino or De Niro in his youth, he is very, very hard to look at (filmed six years before his death around 2000) and the talking-dead doc camera is just way too close to his face which includes horribly damaged teeth, sickly chapped lips and a giant grotesque sty on top of his eyelid... He's just gross...

For this documentary to fit into how docs are now, he has to brag about being a gay revolutionary instead of a career criminal lowlife who robbed a bank and pointed guns at human beings...

It's very doubtful he robbed a bank with a young dangerous hoodlum (who was younger than John Cazale in the movie, and not quietly endearing but loud and scary) just for the sex change of his boyfriend to girlfriend...

He robbed the bank to have a load of money... He didn't just take the amount needed for a sex change... He wanted a lot of money the fast way...

But like all left wing docs, a genuine scumbag is turned into a kind of anti-hero, which isn't the doc's fault since Lumet's classic Dog Day Afternoon did the same thing, only it was entertaining, and shockingly the FBI are also made to look decently enough....

Overall THE DOG is an interesting viewing and a way to pass the time, it's just a bit too idolizing of someone who was a criminal and continued to be a criminal. But, that's show biz...

The truth is, though... neither Pacino or Lumet wanted anything to do with this kook, ever, even when he got out of and back into jail for the rest of his troubled life.

Like looking at a car wreck or circus freak. The protagonist John W. Is narcissistic, delusional and believes he is a cult/folk hero. The narrative is he robbed a bank and held the employees hostage to pay for his lovers sex change. The hostage aspect of his crime is reduced to insignificance while seemingly attempting to justify his actions as a result of the prevailing prejudice against homosexuals at that time. Listening to John talk about his actions and life make you realize how far fetched Al Pacino's character is from the actual person.