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Antics:
Snow
Dogs & WayDownTown
By
Jan Aaron
While
saluting Black Heritage, let’s praise many entertainers like Cuba
Gooding Jr., who, as Ted Brooks, makes the whole family laugh
in Brian Levant’s Snow Dogs. It’s a pleasant outing for
these times, avoiding violence, sexy scenes and unsavory language.
Gooding’s Brooks is a successful dentist in Miami who discovers
he’s the main beneficiary of a will. But his dreams turn to mush
when he finds his inheritance is a shack and a team of Siberian
sled dogs in a tiny Alaskan town. The dogs greet the city slicker
by ripping his red parka to shreds.
Ted has other problems. The town’s bully, Thunder Jack (James
Coburn), seems to hate him on sight and wants to buy his dogs
at a ridiculously low price.
Ted wants to head back to Miami, but he falls for a local beauty,
Barb (Joanna Bacalso), a warm hearted barmaid, who tutors him
in local life. Also, Ted is here to find his real father. (His
Miami mother never had the courage to tell him he was adopted).
Imagine the surprise to this African American that his dad is
Caucasian– the meanie, Thunder Jack. The two reconcile, of course.
That’s about as serious as it gets.
Most of the time Gooding smiles, falls and slips on the ice and
flails his arms, pitching his performance to the youngest in the
audience. In one memorable sequence, he insists on showing his
prowess and rides his team of dogs
over a steep ledge onto an extremely thin sheet of ice.
For more sophisticated comedy, see Gary Burn’s WayDownTown,
a sleek Canadian prize-winner about a group of young office workers
in an interconnected series of office and apartment buildings
and food courts who have staked a month’s salary on a bet to see
who can stay indoors longest. The movie covers lunch hour day
24 of the wager when everything is falling apart and everyone
would pay a price for freedom.
(Snow
Dogs, 95 minutes, Walt Disney Pictures, PG, mild crude humor;
waydowntown, 87 minutes, released by Lot 47 Films, R; call 777-FILM.)
Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 20005, New York, NY 10001. Tel:
(212) 481-5519. Fax: (212) 481-3919. Email: ednews1@aol.com.
All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of
the publisher. © 2001.
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