A Tribute to Star Movies

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  Bangkok, Thailand
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

When Danayi reached me in Bangkok, she was the recent recipient of her Masters of Public Health from prestigious Columbia University in New York. Well, in theory. While she attended Convocation in the spring, there still was the small matter of her thesis not quite being finished. While her landing in Thailand was supposed to be the start of a new exciting chapter in her and my lives, there still was a denouement to be written from her old one.

We ended up spending a couple of weeks in Bangkok on the premise that it was to finish Danayi's thesis and then begin travel in earnest. And some work did get done - no question. But to be honest, most of our time was spent walking, drinking street fruit shakes from our fruit shake girl (best shakes on the planet), and eating street food from the grumpy Thai grandmother and ladyboy run food stalls on our street. This, and watching Star Movies

White Dog!

.

Ahh, Star Movies. How can I explain the sad, ridiculously huge position this television station has played in my life? As my trip has continued, there have been periods of tireness and torpor when I didn't want to go out and see a new temple/eat a bug/fight with rickshaw drivers/step over beggars and dodge cars and motorcycles all day. Sometimes I just wanted to stay in my hotel. Now in Africa, I could never afford to stay in a place with a television. In Asia, all of a sudden, this was a possibility. Whenever I settled in a new hotel or guesthouse room, I would immediately grab the remote and turn on the television. Flicking through the channels I would find old Indian Bollywood extravaganzas, Chinese and Thai dramas that consisted mostly of extreme eye rolling, and Vietnamese government sponsored channels consisting of strange variety shows of synchronized children in patriotic dress attempting to dance to patriotic music in front of a photo back drop from your junior high prom. As the channels changed, I would find myself hoping beyond hope for Star Movies, and if I was really lucky, Star TV and HBO Asia. Even Cinemax, the poor bastard child of cable programming was welcome in my poor western media culture starved state.

Star Movies is the type of channel that explains how people like Lorenzo Lamas and Don "the Dragon" Wilson still have acting careers. Some of the very best worst movies in my life I have seen over the last year on Star Movies. Direct to DVD is the bread and butter of this movie channel. Every once in a while, they advertise an actual honest to goodness, 'real' Hollywood film coming soon and this elicits an excitement that is shameful to contemplate. I will admit that there were times when Danayi and I got so excited at a forthcoming screening of TNMT the movie, or Knocked Up that we actually have extended our stay in a place just to see it

White Dog! in cool retro graphics

. I'm sure we justified it because there was the temple we hadn't seen yet, or we wanted to take language lessons from street kids who were attempting to better their lives, but really, it was that 7:45 pm showing of Tremors and it's follow up, Bring it On that did it.

The best of the worst movies I saw on Star Movies (and believe me, with masterpieces like Martial Law and Cyborg, there was competition) was a 1982 film called "White Dog". I watched it on a lonely night in Nepal. This cinematic masterpiece was actually banned from release in the United States due to its controversial subject matter. In honour of one of the best worst movies I've seen, I give you the story of "White Dog".

It is the story of a young actress (Kristy McNichols) who finds a German Sheppard in the hills of LA and keeps him (the dog is white) but what she doesn't realize is that the dog has been trained to attack and kill black people. She finds the dog, and one night while at home, a rapist breaks into her house. From nowhere, the dog attacks and pins the would-be rapist, with the police arriving soon after. (One of the best lines in the film was when an officer looks at the chewed up loser and says "Damn, this is the same rapist I busted here last year".) Soon after, the dog goes missing, and the young actress is extremely worried. Queue montage of driving through the hills, looking wistfully across fields, getting excited when she hears a dog bark only to see it is some Hollywood Chihuahua. She looks everywhere. That night, there is a street cleaner in a sweeper machine, who happens to be black and the dog jumps in through the window and kills him

White Dog in the flesh

. He drives the garbage truck into a boutique. End scene, no more mention of in the film of the act.

She eventually finds her dog, and takes it to the set of the movie she is working on, but one of her fellow actresses is black, and is attacked and hospitalized by 'white dog'. Her boyfriend tries to tell her she has an attack dog and it should be killed, but she refuses. After all, animals are noble and can't be blamed. She takes the dog to a famous Hollywood animal training institute to see if it can be deprogrammed (like they do for cults). While there it attacks a black worker, and the old fat white owner tells her she has a "white dog" - a dog trained to attack black people. Nothing can be done, it has to be killed.

But then the main trainer Keys, who happens to be black, walks in.. He says he can break this white dog, and that the people who trained him were evil, not the dog. He spends a good portion of the movie being attacked by the dog in a cage wearing pads, trying to break the dog of his hating ways. The dog escapes at one point and chases a black man in a business suit into a church and ravages him to death. The trainer sees this, and shots it with a tranquilizer dart, but despite having just witnessed this dog killing and ravaging the body of a fellow man of colour, he is still determined to reprogram the dog. The actress tries to get Keys, the trainer, to kill the dog after she finds out about the new death (a total of four black men and a black woman having been killed by this evil animal at this point). She says "I want you to shoot him. I don't want any more black people to die!" Very poignant and a watershed in evolution of race relations in cinema. But Keys is determined. It's his goal in life to prove to black hating whities that training dogs to attack black people isn't going to work. He won't give up.
In the end, there is the final test, where he goes into the arena wearing no pads to face the dog. It comes running up and looks like it's going to attack, but! (cue slo mo)....... it stops! Dog licks the trainer's hand. It likes black people now! The girl comes in, and the dog starts running for her. Keys takes out a gun, but WAIT it loves the girl too! It's cured!! But then the fat old guy who runs the animal place comes in to congratulate them and the dog runs towards him and ATTACKS him and Keys shoots it dead. Apparently the only result from training a dog not to attack black people is to drive the dog insane, and make him attack old white men. The credits roll as the camera stays focussed on the dead dogs face and blood

A masterpiece. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

(Postscript - in looking up "White Dog" on the internet to score a movie photo, I have learned that this film is held up as a classic for its portrayal of and messages about racism and it's suppression in the US almost as maligned as the banning of Catcher in the Rye in small town libraries. I mean, it is seriously held up as one of the classics of the genre. Some reviews praise this while panning Paul Haggis's Oscar winning Crash. I suspect the fact that it is still nearly impossible to find in America today adds to its notoriety. You CAN get it in Canada as it was recently released on Criterion Collections, a company dedicated to preserving and releasing under appreciated classics. I have also realized with deep embarrassment, that the animal trainer is NOT Billy Dee Williams, Lando Calrissian from the Empire Strikes Back, but Paul Winfield, a respected character actor. Much of the humour I took from this film was based on Lando Calrissian playing the trainer. Also, in originally writing this entry, I thought Billy Dee Williams was also Apollo Creed in the Rocky films. This, of course, is completely wrong, and Carl Weathers should never have the honour of playing Apollo Creed taken away from him.

So, in making fun of a movie that many hail as a classic and admirable in its handling of racism, I have confused three respected black actors, and lumped them all in as the same man. I think I need to go sit down for a while and think about what I've done. Did I mention my girlfriend is black?)

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