Marmaduke2(“Put the stems over my ears, you f*cking amateurs.”)

If you’re new to Filmdrunk, there’s this game we like to play: take an awful movie we’ll never see, and recreate the plot using only expository quotes (no analysis!) from other people’s reviews.  It tends to be… enlightening.  For today’s edition, it was a toss up between Killers and Marmaduke.  I went with Marmaduke (we’ll save Killers for Monday, perhaps).  The trouble is, a Great Dane farting on stuff isn’t very, shall we say, plot heavy.  It’s more fart heavy.  As such, the reviews tend more towards dog puns (“Between this assignment and “Marley and Me,’’ Owen Wilson should be checked for fleas”) than actual exposition.  Basically, I’m saying I did my best, but I had to cheat a little, like your parents’ marriage.

Like “Sex and the City 2,” “Marmaduke” features well-coifed bitches in heat, nonstop puns and its very own Mr. Big. [NYPost]

A few minutes into the movie, Marmaduke releases an explosive bit of flatulence in his owners’ bed.  [WashingtonPost]

****

Marmaduke, his cat pal (George Lopez) and the other animals talk but can’t be understood by their family. [NYPost]

In a stunning development, this Kansas family moves to Southern California [Orlando Sentinel]

– for Phil’s job as a marketer for a vegetarian dog-food company [Ebert/NYDailyNews] –

land of sun, surfing and status-conscious dog parks. Poor Marmaduke has to find “a new leash on life.”  [Orlando Sentinel]

“It’s like high school, for dogs,” explains Mazie (Emma Stone), the streetwise Queensland Heeler.  [Orlando Sentinel]

From there the story follows two threads. The first has to do with doggy politics: whether the pedigreed dogs at the park are better than the mutts, which apparently include Marmaduke (there’s a reference to him being a mixed breed). He tangles with Bosco (Kiefer Sutherland), the park’s alpha male, [WashingtonPost]

Bosco’s gorgeous collie girlfriend (Fergie) wants to hook up with our hero and be a Marmaduchess, as does a kind-hearted mongrel (Emma Stone). [NYPost]

Lines like “Get your bark on,” “Who let the dogs out?” and “Cowabarka” abound. Many of the jokes revolve around excretory functions. [WashingtonPost]

Marmaduke surfs fake-looking waves and leads the atrocious, all-dog dance number that closes the movie with the camera spinning and soaring. You watch the animals’ bodies lurch and jerk to the Romantics. [BostonGlobe]

Some nicely weird moments are the best ones, as when a group of purse-carried Chihuahuas cosseted by fashionable girls complain, “We are not accessories” and “In my country, I was a lawyer.” A teeny Chinese crested is worried about predators (“This is the land of the puma!”) while the villainous Bosco boasts, out of nowhere, that “I’m the reigning SoCal surf champ.” [NYPost]

Christ, I stopped caring minutes ago.  Can I get someone to sum this all up in one go?

In California, Marmaduke likes his new back yard, but gets in hot water with his family for a dumb reason and runs away. Mazie, the collie he’s been romancing at the park, goes searching for him, and it rains, and Marmaduke gets lost, and his family piles in the station wagon and searches, too, and — long story made short — they all end up where a burst sewer has caused a big sink hole.  Mazie falls in, Marmaduke leaps in after her, they’re swept into a sewer, they come out in an aqueduct, Phil Winslow (Lee Pace) leaps in, and so on and so forth.  [EBERT]

Yeesh, thank you.  This segment works better with Nicholas Sparks movies.  In this case, I think a friend of contributor Burnsy said it best:  Final tallies – Dog farts: 2, urine gags: 3, 
groin hits: 2, belch: 1, record scratches: 2, uses of the phrase ‘Who 
let the dogs out?’: 2

[NYPost, OrlandoSentinel, WashingtonPost, NYDailyNews, RogerEbert, BostonGlobe]