Marley & Me & Me

One of my little mini-goals in life is to select a book and read it before it is made into a movie. That's not likely to happen since I mostly read non-fiction books about tacky tourist attractions and biographies of Walt Disney. It doesn't count if I read the book knowing they are making a movie of it, like I did with Striptease, and I think we'll all agree that The Cat in the Hat doesn't count either. But thanks to a new movie with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, I've come kind of close to meeting my goal.


A few years ago while selecting storybooks for my kids, I picked up a book called Bad Dog, Marley! It's a picture book about a family that adopts a dog and he turns out to be a little too much for them to handle. I thought the book was above average and the kids really enjoyed it and we ended up checking it out of the library a handful of times. Then one Christmas somebody gave us a copy and the story then entered into a permanent rotation in our bedtime story lineup.


I decided to see if the author, John Grogan, had written any other books. It turns out, the book we had been reading was a kiddie version of an adult non-fiction novel called "Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog." There was also a junior novelization of the novel. I picked up the junior novelization and planned to read it aloud to Elias while Tanner was taking his naps. (*minor spoiler alert) While leafing through the book I noticed a caption under a picture that read "One of the last pictures we took of Marley". It sounded like that book was not going to have a happy ending so I passed on reading it to Elias.


I later picked up the full length version of the book and read it at the beach this past summer. It's a very entertaining tale of a young couple who adopts a puppy which quickly grows up to become one crazy dog. I'm not that fond of dogs...or animals in general for that matter...but I found the book to be a really good read.

Anywho...sometime shortly before I picked up the original novel, it was announced that there was to be a major motion picture based on the book Marley & Me. There's been a teaser trailer out for a while, and the studio just released a full trailer with clips from the film. I gotta say, every clip in the trailer is from a scene in the book. It looks like it's going to be a good film. The kids are excited to see it....and YES, I have prepared them for the possible ending!

Here's the new trailer: