Beverly Hills Chihuahua Has Little Bite

Genre going to the dogs, critics moan
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 3, 2008 2:00 PM CDT
Beverly Hills Chihuahua Has Little Bite
A chihuahua lives the high life in 'Beverly Hills Chihuahua.'   (Disney Pictures)

“If you’re going to make anything as ridiculous as a talking-dog movie, you might as well go all the way,” and Beverly Hills Chihuahua does just that, writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. The story of a lapdog of luxury who finds herself among Aztec Chihuahua warriors, the film may be “reasonably diverting,” but “amid an economic meltdown, its mere existence feels utterly insane.”

Mark Olsen, writing in the Los Angeles Times, bemoans a different kind of downturn: the collapse in quality of children’s films. They were once "gentle, freewheeling tales” with “minor life lessons”; now they’re “crass, reductionist affairs, indoctrinating kids to consumer culture.” But “when you’re 7,” observes Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News, talking dogs are “hard to resist.”
(More movie review stories.)

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