Sam Sloan

I Found a DVD of this movie at the library and by now I've seen most of the movies they have that I expect to be any good. I didn't expect to find anything worth watching when I found My Friend Dahmer. And I still didn't expect it would be as good as it turned out to be and began watching it still thinking that. I was probably half way though the movie before I realized that what I was watching was top quality in what you would expect a great movie to be. This wasn't just some low cost production movie with untalented nobodies. Except for Anne Heche, everyone in this movie may be unknown, but their acting talent was superb. Therefore, after I had watched it once, I had to watch it again from the beginning, more closely. Because by then I could take this movie more seriously.

The story really captivated me. I assumed Dahmer as a totally different person than what the movie revealed about him. He was weird, that is true, but weird in a way that actually made him quite popular and liked by many of his classmates, though many of the girls may have put off by his weirdness. The movie doesn't explore anything about when and how he murdered anyone because this only tells what he was like before he committed his first murder, though by this time he was into mutilating and torturing non-domesticated animals like squirrels and rodents. He is shown at one phase where he is in the woods with a knife to the throat of a very beautiful and trusting white dog about to cross that threshold when he breaks off from his intention and releases the dog and shoos him away. The scene made me cringe. We know that he will someday give in to his desires and go on to kill 17 people and we expect that to include many animals like that dog he had let go. But before he does, we find out what he was really like before he became so infamous. Infamous he became, but after you watch this, you may come away not hating him, but actually liking him for the .boy that he was.

I really recommend this movie very highly.

There are a lot of sitcoms out there and none of them as far as I am concerned are much worth watching. You have to go back many years to find really good sitcoms and this one set in the Roaring Twenties was one of them. I used to love watching it and only after two seasons, it was gone! I thought It might have been some mistake taking this show off the air. But it wasn't. I wish they would show this again as re-runs just to show how to make a good sitcom.

A few weeks ago, for some reason, I started thinking about this show and couldn't remember the name of it. Without the power of the internet, I wouldn't have found it. But now that I have, I want everyone to know what a great show it was. The show is too far in the past to ever bring back the original actors, some of whom have passed on, but maybe it would be possible to recreate the show from the formula of the original. Hopefully, the old shows are still around in some vault.

Yes, I cried and I could simply write another review saying I did what everyone else did who watched this movie but I want to add something else no one has mentioned. This was a true story of a dog that had lived and died in 1934 with the last ten years of its life spent at a train station waiting for his deceased owner to return who never can in this life, but only in the next. And that reunion will leave you in tears, not only for the happy and deserved reunion between Hachi and his owner, but anyone we have loved and lost and imagined and hoped awaited them.

But if the reunion in our next life only exists between humans, I for one would be sorely disappointed not to have my own pets I have loved and lost and awaiting me at a place some have called the rainbow bridge. But this reunion between Hachi and his owner takes place where he has loyally and patiently awaited for ten years through cold and warmth, rain and snow. At the end of the movie we learn the true Hachi was a dog named Hachiko that lived in Japan. A statue of the dog has been placed there in a pose sitting and waiting as he had been seen for the last ten long years of his life, living for no other purpose than to reunite with the person he loved.

I am often sent letters from animal rights groups asking me to help stop the dog meat trade in East Asia, Korea especially. I have been to Korea and and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I could only stay away from the markets I knew where it was going on to shield my eyes from something I knew I couldn't change. The practice I've heard seems to be dying out as a new generation shows a greater affection for dogs and an inclination for fast food, though the practice still exists with an estimated three million dogs each year being killed and eaten. It is in such places this movie needs to be shown. It would be a wonderful legacy for Hachiko if his loyalty and devotion could be rewarded by helping to change how dogs are treated not only in East Asia but everywhere in the world.