Marley & Me: The Puppy Years

Because the original Marley & Me was essentially a depressing allegory for maturation as a mode of giving up on hope and passion, settling for life's adequacies, it's odd that someone would feel compelled to make a sequel. This isn't just because the dog died at the end of the first, but, really, what else is there to explore and say beyond, "life is a hard pill to swallow"? Rest assured that The Puppy Years has nothing to do with the original. In fact, I suspect that neither the writers nor the director actually took the time to watch the original, or read the book, or even watch the trailer. Here, Marley is left with a nephew of the Grogans' for the summer, so that he can learn the valuable lesson of responsibility while training the dog to do an obstacle course for a Purina competition. Seemingly, it's aimed at a completely different demographic than the first film, seeing as the dog actually talks in this one. Beyond the obvious bewilderment at the human preoccupation with the anthropomorphizing of household pets, there are many questions raised in this shockingly bad exercise in art as commercial product. Here are just a few: Why do the dogs have to fart every five minutes? Why does the cat have a French accent? Why are there multiple German men living in a mansion training dogs to win low-grade dog food competitions? Why does the neighbour character only have crutches intermittently? Why does rap music play as soon as black characters walk on screen? Why did they cast a flamboyantly gay teen as the lead and then have him express romantic interest in a girl? Why would a dog put dentures in his mouth? Why would someone have 80 cans of spam in their cupboard? Why are there so many pine trees in Florida? Why does the soundtrack sound like Jimmy Eats World? Why do people introduce themselves by first and last names like real-estate agents? Why are there so many jokes about accidentally blowing off the heads of stuffed animals? Wasn't that guy on Danger Bay? And, mostly, why the hell would anyone ever want to watch this movie? They don't answer any of these questions in the special features, but they do talk about training puppies while showing clips from the movie.