Here's how I connect dog parks to working as a PA.
Sort of.
Anyway, I live with a woman and three dogs. The woman is my wonderful wife, the dogs are my kids and my best friends.
There's a great dog park/beach up in Richmond, almost directly across the Bay from the Golden Gate Bridge. My wife's friend clued her into the place, and now Point Isabella has become a regular destination for outings with the pups, especially since my wife has apparently become a little obsessed with the vague threat of mountain lions or cougars or something leaping out of the brush in nearby Joaquin Mill Park and attacking our 7-year-old toy poodle, Bear. (This is thanks to my wife Sarah's friend Ailish. So thanks again, dammit.)
As dog owners know perfectly well, be wary of damn near all off-leash dogs when at a dog park. There are certain breeds you don't really need to worry about at all: golden retrievers, most black labs, St. Bernards (St. Bernies just sorta lay there and check you out). Goldens are generally good-natured and just wanna chase balls - they retrieve, after all. Black labs, like our dog Lily, love to eat, swim, and shred their toys.
And then you have your mixes - we have a two-year-old dog named Ollie (short for Olive, and although that's the name on her papers and dogtag, no one calls her that and she won't answer to it. Go figure. Go on, figure it out and get back to me.) - Ollie is mix of chocolate lab, weimaraner... and some other stuff. She's a little neurotic, obsessed with chasing balls, and can get kind of aggressive when other dogs hang out around her too much... especially if there's food nearby.
Ollie and Lily are like sisters, and if other dogs at the park try and play with Lily too much, Ollie gets snappy with them. We're working on modifying that behavior by crating her again. We had stored the crates once we moved to Oakland from L.A., mostly due to the lack of space (the bigger these dogs got, the bigger the crates), but we now realize that this might've been a mistake.
Dogs, like almost any other creature on the planet, like to feel safe and secure. They don't seem to like their crates much, but when things get tense (like mommy and daddy arguing about daddy's habit of leaving his pants unfolded on the bed, his shoes scattered around the floor and the used Q-tips that mommy finds, like, everywhere), Ollie and Lily both usually dive under the bed to wait out the storm.
After Ollie went a little nutty on one of Sarah's mom's toy poodles (a teacup poodle, really, a tiny little sack of bones smaller than a game hen, but a sweet, old dog), we started crating her again... and it looks like this is starting to work: Ollie is less aggressive and a little calmer now that she has her little home to run into whenever she needs to.
Which brings me to people at the dog park: two major things get on my goddam nerves... 1) why do people insist on not only acquiring massive, mutant-looking pit bulls but also bring them to dog parks to socialize with other breeds and then let them off their damn leash, where they make a bee-line for my dogs and end up starting shit because Ollie hates sharing her ball and she shouldn't have to because it's hers! Dammit! Okay. 2) some people seem to encourage their dogs' bad behavior.
The other day, while my wife and I were at Point Isabella, I spied a few people chatting. Their dogs, though, were positively yelling at each other. One guy had a black mix - this little dude seemed part setter, part lab, part who-knows - and this dog was bouncing up and down, ceaselessly barking at this other dog, who kept backing away, toward it's owners legs... the barking dog's owner kept chanting "Get 'im! Get 'im, boy!"
These owners irk the living shit out of me. Dogs have enough problems - mock me if you want, but some breeds are prone to diseases like leukemia and others, like German shepherds, have notoriously bad hips and can end up immobile and in pain during their later years. Add the fact that it's just not a dog's world - they like to bolt in any direction when an interesting scent crosses their naughty little noses - like the early morning a few months ago when I took Ollie and Lily out front to their business. A squirrel was climbing up a telephone pole across the street, and the damn dogs just took off. There was no traffic, thank whatever god watches over dumb dogs, but it still freaked me out. It's just not a dog's world.
Which brings me back to PA work... somehow. I only have the flimsiest possible connective here, but bad dogs are like bad PAs - surly, unpredictable, and not very friendly. Of course, some say there are no bad dogs, just bad owners, and that's only partially true. Some dogs are just born nasty, but a good production manager can make a bad PA into a marginally useful one.
Then again, a bad production manager will try to stick you with the cost of repairing a fucking van whose side you crunched in, even though you never should've been driving the damn thing in the first place, but since the producers are too cheap to rent a third production vehicle, they borrowed the DP's personal van, which you weren't used to and went ahead and scraped the side door across a corner of the local parking garage. After you raise hell and they finally back off - and the company agrees to cover the repair cost, as bloody damn well they should - you're promised a spot on the next round of shooting, and then told a mere week before expecting to go back to work that they don't need you.
The film industry can be a big dog park, full of squabbling, yapping, nipping, biting... and, sometimes, full-on, fur-shredding dogfights.
And, because my wife likes to read my movie reviews, here's the last review of mine which was posted on MediumRareTV.org:
The Good, The Bad, The Weird
Directed by: Ji-woon Kim
Written by: Ji-woon Kim, Min-suk Kim
Produced by: Jae-Won Choi
Starring: Kang-ho Song, Byung-hun Lee, Woo-sung Jung
Running Time (in minutes): 130 mins.
Language: Korean and Mandarin (w/English subtitles)
Rated: Not Rated
So what's wrong with making a Korean version of a legendary spaghetti western (Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly)? After all, John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven is a retelling of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Leone's A Fistful of Dollars is Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In a way, it seems only fair, especially as talk persists of an unfortunate American remake of Chan-wook Park's great Oldboy.
And from a technical standpoint, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is damned good. Hotshot South Korean director Ji-woon Kim telegraphs his slick intentions with an early shot – the camera follows an eagle as it swoops down, snatching a snake up from a set of railroad tracks just as a train comes roaring by, kicking off the first in a relentless series of shoot-em-ups and chase scenes. As shot by cinematographers Mo-gae Lee and Seung-Chul Oh, they're full of virtuoso tracking shots and bright comic book colors.
Which is what The Good, The Bad, The Weird feels like – a graphic novel version of a spaghetti western. And the plot? There's a treasure map. In 1940's Manchuria, The Good – bounty hunter Park Do-won (played by Woo-sung Jung in the Clint Eastwood role and no match for Clint's flinty scowl) – tracks bandit Yoon Tae-goo (Kang-ho Song, from The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) – here known as The Weird, but everyone in this movie is pretty weird – and both are being hunted by The Bad, brutal killer Park Chang-yi (Byung-hun Lee, whose badass performance steals the show). It turns out almost everyone in Southeast Asia wants this map, including opium-trafficking freedom fighters, a pack of Mongolian-warlord-type goons and the Japanese army. So when the treasure turns out to be... well, that's one clever way to end all of this nonsense.
The wispy-thin plot is just an excuse for one elaborately-staged gunfight set-piece after another... and I'm not complaining about that. For the first hour or so, it's fun – especially when neat little touches show up, like when The Weird uses a copper deep-sea-diving headpiece as a bulletproof helmet (don't ask). What's missing is the epic undercurrents of Leone or Kurosawa's approach to this kind of movie... or, for that matter, Howard Hawk's or John Sturges's or Quentin Tarantino's (there are times when some of the fight scenes feel like outtakes from Kill Bill Vol. 1). The Good, The Bad, The Weird has its moments – the opening train robbery-chase-shoot-out sequence, for instance – but it clocks in at two hours-ten when it should come in at a neat ninety minutes.
Director Ji-woon Kim has clearly seen enough Leone westerns to know that when in doubt, go for the Extreme Close-Up, but he can't calm down long enough to let his characters gain more than one dimension. Only in the final standoff between our three capitalized archetypes does something approaching the grandeur of Sergio Leone's original finally appear. And that treasure? If your eyes don't glaze over by then, it's worth finding out. Just barely.
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