a sight Unseen review of Boo: The World’s Cutest Dog

I don’t think anyone doubted that George Clooney would be able to do a decent, workman job with the extreme naughtiness, sauciness and devastating Je-ne-Sais-Quois X-Factor that is Boo: The World’s Cutest Dog.

The world has been disfigured by Boo’s charisma and sculpted looks. But George Clooney not only measures up to the astronomical task but also brings, miraculously, new and darker, pearlier and even more disturbingly-sensual elements to the rugged and heartstopping cocktail of white-hot appeal that comes erupting, dark-blazingly, to life on the big screen.

Angelina Jolie may have been snubbed by the Awards Syndicate Mafia for her incredible right-wing “Unbroken” but not even the most cynical and weatherbeaten of social/human/laissez-faire critics would doubt for even a second full of pale eggs that all Awards will go to the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap genius that resides in the form of Angelina, George, Jenna Jamison, Antonio Banderas, Snoopy, Jack Black, Julie Andrews, John Holmes, etc, etc.

And that brings me to Antonio who effortless executes the complicated and stately “buddy” role. For really, if there was no Boo, then certainly Buddy on even his worst day would be on a GQ fuck list. Mostly, the seething homoeroticism is left, casually, to boil just under the Canine-Reagan-Fur. Misting, as it were, off it, like a hot, busty turd. Or a blonde cat in a Trevi Fountain. And thank Jesus, o My, because this mundane critic doubts she could have handled any more of the raw bedroom, bathroom and back alley fireworks. Flesh value off the charts! The screen itself seemed poised, simmering all three hours long (yes, it was an old style epic like Cleopatra, or Gone with The Wind), on a verge of explosive religious hate.

(note: during our private screening several upstanding and conservative critics suddenly gave into the temptations of the flesh. Yes, a man to my left just pulled it without any shame. It was zombie-like and parochial, as though he was possessed by forces and politics way outside of his control and ken, and I thought of Hamlet, on a cliff, admonishing Horatio. Soon all the bodies were dragged out on stage. And it was an orgy of men, women, dogs, all writhing together in a bundle of playwright glee. Elephants were cooing. Donkeys and hummingbirds harrumphed. A perverse, delicious ark: as though in an umbilical void of bristling beauty. Were we suddenly in the hands of some dark enchantment? Boo/Clooney a kind of lust overlord? I was bruised all over. I was purring. Insects were crawling out of my ears and nose:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this was a bonafide “metamodern” movie experience. But I can say that it did dissolve, with its fervent and insistent oscillations, all politics and ideologies, in a virtually-cosmic intersplicing of sensual and galactic, grinding hips. And the soundtrack was like an ordinary sultry Georgia Sunday. Like peanut oil. Or the Garden of Eden, innocently meditating, before the rabbits writhed in unforgiven and hopeless melancholy. Or well-designed, high-grade military torture. But, I will leave most of the broccoli and details of what happened in that seething room to the imagination. However, I can disclose that over the course of one cunning, debauched and perfect long weekend we subjected and surrendered ourselves to Boo on the Big Screen at least 11 or 12 times. Leonard Maltin claims it was 27. But I excuse even his exaggerations of Far East Fisheries such is the love coursing through me now as I sit here camped out between the skyscrapers and hostile gathering armies.)

I want to dote, particularly, for a decade or two on the makeup and creature effects of Ray Boom-Boom Mancini and Donald “The Lotus King” Trump because unbeknownst to me Antonio Banderas was sometimes Boo himself while George Clooney was Buddy pushed moaning against the laundry door, drooling. Boo insiders (advanced Scientologist Priests, I think) clued us in on this during a post-orgy briefing. And, we were shocked into humbled silence. Elegant. And green. None of this had suspected this at all. Not even when Buddy is diagnosed with throat cancer and pulls out his matador cape and springs up on the doctor’s table singing “I am George of Milano, I like to Party! Party! Party!” Not even during the flamingo scene. Or the Preparation-H scene. (sighhhhhhh). And not even when Boo unleashes his complicated and patriarchal sorry on a poor old sparrow that flew in to the window and lay there so poignantly unemployed and universally staring up at us. Big props to Sofia Vergara who pulled off this cameo with such unselfish and commercial panache.

When I spoke to Antonio, about faith, bandits and the bedroom across the hall from the lunatic Mel Gibson, he said that the switching of roles (with results that dwarf Cage and Travolta in Face Off, the previous Gold Standard) just happened suddenly, organically, as though a great bolt of light had thrust in through the ceiling of an old Spanish Mosque. “Mosca,” he said to me, “it was like all so Chiflada, my soul on a leash, my body heeling: O Captain, O Captain!” Yeah, he said, Angelina had nothing to do with it at all. That his barking throat had somehow just flipped, like a light switch, from Buddy to Boo and so forth. It was like crossing the Rubicon, he suggested. And he and George waved to each other, comfy in their gondola boxes. (ahhhhhh. Gives ya goose bumps, no???)

My only problem with Boo (and is it really a problem?) was the charnel house and food processing scenes?? Was it really necessary to go all Chaucer on us and actually annihilate so many chickens, turkeys, quails, ducks, geese, capons, sparrows, canaries, mockingbirds, ostriches, etc, etc ?? I hear, all told, that millions of our fine-feathered friends gave their lives up for the great dark-night-of-the-soul killing-spree scene where Boo maniacally foams about for what seems like an eternity in a fox and wolf suit like a deranged Dorothy dispatching evil witches in a soapy basin. I am still kind of traumatized by all the castration and throat slashing.

When I asked George Clooney about this he flew into a rage, foaming:

“Listen here, my darling, all that birdmeat went to KFC! And neither they nor I was born with a silver spoon in a JMW Turner painting! Are you so naive as to believe there’s never any collateral damage? Even beauty, in its greatest Walmart epitome, is going, from time to time, to rattle and bloody a few casual, sloppy feathers. I was innocent once. Before all the cigars and Vegas real estate. But I now look down on it all like a queen ant who knows how the whole damn ant framework works!”

And his lips twitched. And his face seemed to shatter, And then he got real sad. And suddenly we were kissing. Smoothing each other’s faces down. Weeping. Going at each other, timelessly and hyper-fascistly, in a dark bedroom lit up only by giant luminescent Boo and Buddy glow-on-the-cave-wall figures. I felt as though I was coming into being. I felt like George was the cave animal emerging out of the deep and worthless human world.

The great Hieronymous Bosch is purported to have drained a special British blend of tea arousant at least three or four times a day in order to support the cactus-lush sproutings of his bald and tender imagination or his prime child-rearing years. And you’d better believe that George and I refreshed ourselves of such a tea as we organized governments in our bodies. And then the coups. And then the hearings in the Hague. Distraught dictators brought out and smudged away in naked, glass cages. An exotic alien run through with a wire, over and over. A parrot shrieking in the branches. A baker with a headache breaking into new lapping forms of consciousness.

A couple of weeks later I had lunch with Boo, the dog, himself.

It was all so immaculate. I took him for a walk. He crapped on the sidewalk.

Good boy, I whispered to him. The birds were like angels. I was a God. I can’t wait for the sequel. Good boy. Good boy.

editor’s note: this post is part of our Sight Unseen series in which people review movies or they have NOT seen or read. Guidelines for submitting to Sight Unseen can be found here