‘A DOG’S WAY HOME’ Rated PG

Best-selling author W. Bruce Cameron has carved out a niche in his heartwarming stories about man’s best friend that become fodder for cinematic family-fare. If you’ve read the book or seen the movie “A Dog’s Purpose,” you get the idea.

Now along comes “A Dog’s Way Home,” another Smith adaptation, which explores a canine journey that also tugs on the heart. The dog in question is Bella (voiced by Bryce Dallas Howard), rescued from an abandoned home slated for demolition.

Finding a home with Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King), a medical student and worker at the VA hospital, and his mom Terri (Ashley Judd), a war veteran suffering from PTSD, Bella is adorable but nevertheless considered a pit bull outlawed by city ordinance in Denver.

Motivated by malice, the animal-control officer, corrupted by a real estate developer’s distaste for how Lucas has interfered with his plans to raze property inhabited by feral cats, captures Bella when she runs free in the neighborhood.

Lucas and his co-worker and eventual love interest Olivia (Alexandra Shipp) are devastated by the treatment of Bella, with Olivia calling out the city policy as basically “racism for dogs.”

Retrieving the lovable dog from the pound, Lucas and Terri have no other choice than to send Bella to live 400 hundred miles away with Olivia’s relatives in New Mexico.

Since Bella had been trained to be familiar with the notion to “go home,” she decides to do just that. Thus begins a long and often hazardous journey through small towns, forests and mountain ranges.

The quest to find Lucas affords our canine heroine a chance to meet all sorts of interesting characters of both the human and animal variety. Food and shelter prove not so easy to obtain, and this leads to some interesting situations.

Early on, Bella falls in with some four-legged friends who have a daily routine of dumpster-diving as well as begging for food scraps from a few humans only too willing to share leftovers and other treats.

When all alone on her journey, Bella becomes ingenious in how she steals food from a convenience store or a family’s backyard barbeque. These occasions lend themselves to a humorous touch.

Out in the wild, Bella witnesses a pair of hunters killing a cougar, befriending its cub left behind. This act of kindness has ramifications later on when Bella is confronted by a pack of vicious wolves.

Considering that the journey takes over two years, Bella lives for a time with a gay couple who found her when hiking. Later on, Bella becomes attached to a homeless veteran (Edward James Olmos) who needs companionship.

“A Dog’s Way Home,” targeted for family entertainment and appealing to dog lovers, is so heavy on sentiment for the love of furry companions that one is likely to get misty-eyed. That will be the case when Bella is reunited with her family.



‘SCHOOLED’ ON ABC NETWORK

By now, the ABC sitcom “The Goldbergs,” set in the ‘80s, has set a standard for yet another family thriving on dysfunction. What should we expect from its spin-off, the new sitcom “Schooled,” which is set in the ‘90s if only to place a key character in the right perspective?

Lainey Lewis (AJ Michalka), the girlfriend of Barry (Troy Gentile) in “The Goldbergs,” has found her hopes of being a rock star dashed, so she tries out for the job of music teacher at her former high school.

Looking for a steady paycheck (actually, she wants to be paid up front in one lump sum), Lainey’s qualifications are so thin that she states her credentials as “I love music; I work well with children, probably.”

The school principal, John Glascott (Tim Meadows), is not exactly sold on hiring Lainey until Beverly Goldberg (Wendi McLendon-Covey), making a cameo appearance and meddling as always, seals the deal for Lainey to fill the position.

By all measures, Lainey was not exactly a stellar student, of which she is reminded by Coach Rick Mellor (Bryan Callen), who has his hands full trying to mold his star basketball player to work as a team member rather than going it alone as could a superstar like Michael Jordan.

In the first episode, Lainey proves to be rough around the edges, which may be expected from a novice teacher who just happens to oversleep on the first day without bringing a note from home.

The best student in the music class turns out to be the rebellious Felicia (Rachel Crow, fifth place winner in “The X Factor), niece of the principal, and she’s not thrilled that her uncle plans for the class to hold a doo-wop concert.

If we are grading on the curve, “Schooled,” at its early stage as a freshman show, might achieve a C+, but there’s hope it could find its comedic voice to reach for a higher score. The cast is talented enough to raise the bar.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – Middletown Art Center’s Restore Project features and introduction to welding metal armatures with metalsmiths Mark Nichols and Dave Hubbard this Saturday, Jan. 19, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Woodland Community College metal shop.

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The glaciers that flattened my part of the world made their exit eons ago, but in Alaska, where Peggy Shumaker lives and writes, they're just now beginning to turn back.

Only deep in a Nebraska snowbank can you shovel your way into the blue she describes at the end of this poem, from her new and selected poems, Cairn, from Red Hen Press.

Exit Glacier

When we got close enough
we could hear

rivers inside the ice
heaving splits

the groaning of a ledge
about to

calve. Strewn in the moraine
fresh moose sign—
tawny oblong pellets
breaking up

sharp black shale. In one breath
ice and air—

history, the record
of breaking—

prophecy, the warning
of what's yet to break

out from under
four stories

of bone-crushing turquoise
retreating.

American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited manuscripts. It is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2018 by Peggy Shumaker, "Exit Glacier," from Cairn: New and Selected, (Red Hen Press, 2018). Poem reprinted by permission of Peggy Shumaker and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2018 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

‘THE MULE’ Rated R

A person begins a life of crime typically at a young age, but the true story of Leo Sharp upends that scenario, for he became a drug courier as an octogenarian.

This forms the basis for Clint Eastwood’s “The Mule,” for which he directs himself as the titular character.

In the cinematic version, Eastwood’s Earl Sharp is a 90-year-old war veteran and horticulturist famed for his daylilies. So far this parallels the same background of his real-life subject matter.

In “The Mule” version, Earl has a farm in Peoria, Illinois and he’s fallen on hard times as his flower business has been hurt by the online marketplace. As a result, the local bank forecloses on his home and business.

At his granddaughter’s wedding, he learns making good money as a truck driver. But Earl is unaware that his advanced age and spotless driving record of going to far-flung places in his old Chevy pickup is of interest to a Mexican drug cartel.

As a driver, Earl’s proves his worth by numerous trips between Arizona and Detroit delivering bundles of illicit drugs. At first, he’s unaware of his cargo, but the payments for his efforts are so generous that he’s soon able to reclaim his property from the bank.

The ill-gotten gains also allow Earl to rebuild the local Veterans of Foreign Wars hall for his war buddies. He also seeks to ingratiate himself with his estranged family.

The family angle becomes an interesting part of the story. His ex-wife Mary (Dianne Wiest) remains bitter that he spent their marriage on the road, while his daughter Iris (Alison Eastwood) hasn’t spoken to him since the day he failed to show up for her wedding.

Meanwhile, Earl merrily goes his own way with drug deliveries, even forming a bond with the Latinos at the nondescript garage where transfers of money and drugs are loaded into his truck.

But it’s not all fun and games for Earl when Mexican drug lord Senor Laton (Andy Garcia), seeing how his mule is taking on bigger hauls, assigns an unpleasant handler (Ignacio Serricchio) to keep tabs on Earl’s activities.

Meanwhile, the fact that drugs are flooding into the Midwest are not going unnoticed by federal law enforcement, and Bradley Cooper’s DEA agent Colin Bates, assisted by Agent Trevino (Michael Pena), goes on the road to track down an elusive courier.

Before his eventual capture by the law, there’s an interesting encounter between Agent Bates and Earl at a dinner where the conversation is about life choices with Earl paradoxically telling the agent that family is the most important thing.

In the end, before his own misguided choice unravels, Earl seeks to mend his ways with his family, not just with cash, and though it may be a little too late, he nevertheless seeks redemption.

For Eastwood fans who liked “Gran Torino,” there’s pleasure to be had with the almost parallel world of “The Mule.” The octogenarian director and star still has what it takes to deliver a good movie.>



‘FAM’ ON CBS NETWORK

The best thing about the new sitcom “FAM” on the CBS winter schedule just might be the casting, even though laughs are to be had about a young engaged couple getting their life upended by the woman’s estranged family.

Tone Bell’s Nick and Nina Dobrev’s Clem, the charismatic couple, are also upstaged in many ways by Nick’s charming and supportive parents, Rose (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and Walt (Brian Stokes Mitchell, a leading man of musical theatre on Broadway).

On the flipside is Clem’s deadbeat father Freddy (Gary Cole), a NYPD homicide detective who was too busy with his job and chasing women to spend much time with Clem and her half-sister Shannon (Odessa Adlon).

Of greater concern to Nick and Clem is when Shannon shows up uninvited by picking the lock to their apartment. Suddenly, without any help from Freddy, the couple becomes unwilling surrogate parents to an out-of-control rebellious teen who dropped out of high school.

This turn of events leads to all sorts of comedic complications while Nick and Clem are in the midst of planning a wedding for which Rose, for one, seems to want a role in organizing.

Gary Cole scores many of the laughs with his carefree attitude about all family matters before shifting gears to trying mightily to impress his daughters and Nick’s parents that he is becoming a changed person.

Invited to a family dinner, Freddy dresses up nicely and brings an expensive bottle of wine for Rose and Walt, and then he just happens to admit that the fancy wine belonged to a hedge fund manager and was “swiped from the evidence locker.”

“FAM” has comedic promise that is worth a try. The show’s title is inspired by Shannon’s remark that “no one says family any more, it’s just fam.” This slang word has not been in my vernacular and probably never will be. However, I could tune into more episodes of “FAM.”

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – The Middletown Art Center’s Restore project features a writers workshop with Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga this Saturday, Jan. 12, from noon to 4 p.m.

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Nancy Miller Gomez lives in California and directs writing workshops for incarcerated men and women.

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