Dog On Screen

IN ONE of the crowded punk clubs in Dogs in Space, a band plays in front of a sign which reads: "Boredom is counterrevolutionary." This movie amply demonstrates, however, that boredom is anything but. It's just boring.

Dogs in Space

Written and directed by Richard Lowenstein

At the Harvard Square Cinema

Dogs focuses on a bunch of punk rockers, students and hangers-on living together in slovenly chaos in Melbourne's post-punk scene of the late '70s. Their life is a constant decadent merry-go-round of clubs and convenience stores, drugs and drugged-out sex. The characters are bored enough to watch static on TV, as they do in one scene. You can imagine how the audience feels.

Writer-director Lowenstein uses glossy images and clever camera angles to give the movie a slick, high-tech look in the same vacuous MTV style of his INXS videos. The movie looks great, but is so hopelessly vapid that it hardly matters. This emptiness is due to Lowenstein's complete neglect of some of the niceties of movie-making--plot and character.

Michael Hutchence, lead singer of the band INXS is the movie's big draw. I shudder to think what the millions of love-sick teenagers who think Hutchence is a puppy-dog version of Mick Jagger are going to think when confronted with the constant onslaught of idiotic, random dialogue, offensive jokes and drug abuse and vomiting of Dogs In Space.

Starting with one of Hutchence's very first scenes, in which he shakes dust out of his overgrown locks, he is a brooding, inarticulate animal. He is utterly uninteresting as an actor, and only in the film's final scene as he sings "Rooms for the Memory" does he exhibit the sensuality and vitality that make him an outstanding lead singer. By that point in the movie, however, it's too little too late.

LOWENSTEIN lifts a good deal of his material from Alex Cox's classic depiction of punk life, Sid and Nancy, including a fantasy sequence that Cox could sue him for if scenes were copyrighted. He needn't bother, however, since Lowenstein never even approaches the level of intelligence and cohesiveness that made Cox's movie so compelling. Lowenstein doesn't understand that the way to portray chaos and boredom is not to be chaotic and boring.

The only people who could care less about Dogs than the audience are the characters. They are disaffected refugees from the stifling mores of their middle-class parents. Rebellion is a fine thing, but this motley bunch of outcasts replace the materialism and hypocrisy of their bourgeois upbringing with complete apathy--their lives are as messy as their house. Lowenstein wants to be daring by eliminating any entertaining conventions of movie-making and we're supposed to be hip enough not to care. But if the stream of people beating a retreat out of the theatre was any evidence, not caring means not staying.

Lowenstein ultimately betrays his own disorganized esthetic and falls back on the same conventional plot devices that his movie ostensibly tries to subvert. There's a scene where Saskia Post, as Hutchence's girlfriend Anna, drives around in a jealous snit because her boyfriend has kissed someone else. It's a scene that would fit better in a John Hughes teen flick. Dogs is at its most banal during the infuriatingly run-of-the-mill sex scenes between Hutchence and Post. Blue Lagoon had more spice in its sex life.

Bad taste is not cool. For instance, there's the running gag about a fat girl whose only "funny" attribute is being overweight. Shooting up scenes and an extremely unfunny deflowering complete the offensive picture.

Dogs in Space is prefaced with a quote from Iggy Pop which reads: "We're living on dog food/ So what." So what...my sentiments exactly.