Culture
Brad Pitt Loses Top Billing In His Own Film To A Dog Named Uber
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Brad Pitt, two-time Sexiest Man Alive and one of approximately eleven human beings alive who genuinely looks better with age, opened his new drama 'Heart of the Beast' this week to reviews that spent a great deal of time discussing a dog.
The dog's name is Uber. He is a German Shepherd. He did not audition in the conventional sense, does not have a publicist, and has never once given an interview about his process. He is, according to four separate critics and one man who wept in a Cobb County parking garage for twenty minutes, the emotional center of the film.
'I think what Uber brings to the screen is a kind of raw, unmediated truth that you simply cannot manufacture,' said director Elliot Marsh at the Los Angeles premiere, standing next to Brad Pitt, who smiled in the way a person smiles when they have made peace with something. 'Brad gives a tremendous performance. But Uber is not performing. Uber is simply being. That's the difference.'
Pitt himself described working with Uber as 'humbling,' which is the word you use when the word you are looking for is unavailable in polite company.
The film follows a retired search-and-rescue coordinator, played by Pitt, who partners with a German Shepherd to find a missing child in the Pacific Northwest. The story is emotionally straightforward. The dog is not.
Uber, according to the production notes, was trained for fourteen months by a specialist named Donna Velasquez, who has previously trained dogs for three network procedurals and a Subaru commercial that also made people cry. 'He has extraordinary emotional range,' Velasquez confirmed. 'He knows the difference between a take and a rehearsal. I have worked with humans who do not.'
Dog owners are responding with what can only be described as preemptive grief. Across social media, people who own German Shepherds, Labrador Retrievers, mixed-breed animals of uncertain parentage, and in at least one documented case a very large cat, are warning each other not to watch 'Heart of the Beast' within emotional range of their pets.
'I watched it with my dog Clarence on the couch,' wrote one woman in a Facebook group with 340,000 members, 'and when it ended I held him for an hour and told him things I had never told anyone. He knows now. He knows everything.'
The studio, to its credit, leaned into this. The marketing materials feature Uber prominently and Brad Pitt slightly smaller, which is either a bold artistic statement or a quiet acknowledgment of the current power structure.
Pitt's representatives did not respond to requests for comment, which is itself a kind of comment.
'Heart of the Beast' is rated PG-13 for thematic elements and one scene of moderate peril. Dog owners are advised to add an hour to their runtime estimate for the portion of the evening spent sitting on the floor explaining themselves.
Uber had no comment. He did not need one.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bright-side-bring-the-tissues-for-brad-pitts-new-movie