Rich La Bonte (flatrich) I've been following Giovanni Ribisi's career since the 80s because I love character actors and this guy has always been a great character actor and I came across The Dog Problem in the cable listings and thought: "Giovanni Ribisi in a lead role?" Now I gotta wonder why no one has cast him in a lead before this? Anyway, see this movie! It's one of those great little films you'll never forget and everybody in it is fantastic and Scott Caan (who wrote and directed and co-stars) made all the right choices here. (Mark Mothersbaugh does the music and Phil Parmet shot it - that didn't hurt either.) Trust me, this movie is no dog!

tedthumb The Dog Problem is a smart love story of sorts with prefect comedy timing. I was overwhelmed on how excellent on every level this movie was. Scott Caan was already a proved actor. The Dog Problem showed his talents as not only a writer but a director to boot. Brilliant work! How does a gem of a movie like this with a talented everything fly under the radar of Hollywood? This movie is far superior to 90% of movies shown in theaters. The dog Spot was a scene stealer. The part of Spot walking with that song nobody walks in LA was funny. Scott Caan the story simple. Too many movies try to do too much. This a must see.

JohnFeatherstone The Dog problem.. Have seen it twice. A nice break from serious Action flicks, or somber dramas. Its light, cleaver, fun to watch, and I felt like I'd met some of the characters in real life. Just an odd mix of misfit people stumbling through life... Incomplete closures, partial answers, and in so many ways a caricature of life.The pseudo Rorschach inkblot test-like opening credits are brilliantly on theme, and the music from former Devo man, Mark Mothersbaugh, is icing on the cake.Giovani Rabisi shines as an oddball self analytic writer who doesn't quite know what to do with himself, or anyone else. Don Cheadle is always fun to watch, and the dog is cool, playing his role very understated, look for him as feature player in his own movies soon.Kudos to Scott Caan.

Polaris_DiB Giovanni Ribisi should be well-known as a character actor by now, I'm not too certain his take on popular-consciousness. He is, however, very good at what he does, and the movies he's in are marked by low-budget storytelling (some call it "Indiewood") that focuses on character and dialog-driven writing rather than large-budget genre creations of the mainstream or thematic art-house sensibilities. Because of this, the types of films he's in are never really for a very big audience: they don't attract key demographics, they don't interest avant-gardists, they don't create international followings, they just sort of exist as nice stories. Thus, they're very hard to recommend because they don't technically offer anything new and they don't offer spectacle, and for that, "Indiewood" gets a lot of criticism. However, I think that these films need to be taken as they come, not as a movement itself, because honestly they are the pared-down narrative style which means it's the story itself that matters, not the relationship it has with the consumer.Ribisi plays a neurotic writer (think Woody Allen without trying to be Woody Allen) who, through a hint of his therapist, gets a dog. He hardly has time to figure out what owning a dog entails before people start asking him for it, and slowly he finds he has to defend himself and the dog from the onslaught, finding a girl and a life in the process.I like it because it has this continuous theme of names in it (the dog's name, people's first names, stripper names, etc.) and because it has a pretty concise approach to showing how each person is really just looking for love, which for some reason the ugly mutt represents to all of them. I think that a general audience looking for small-budget character-driven films would really like it. It also has a lot of witty, quotable dialog which, if this movie was bigger or more popular, would give it something like a "Napoleon Dynamite" status." --PolarisDiB