Hello, my name is Emily. I am a dachshund.

I am cute, but generally confused. The origin of this confusion can be found in the name of my breed, which was derived from the original tachskreiger, literally ‘badger warrior’. I am designed to hunt badgers. If I have a quizzical expression on my face,

it’s because I’m wondering: Where are the badgers? or Why aren’t there more badgers around?

In the absence of badgers, I generally bark at everything, assuming, naturally enough, that they might be badgers. I have barked at fish, bunnies, and even a video of myself on the TV. I have also barked at a Slipskull Chimera, which is an alien race of creatures that do not exist. It’s only fair, since this is while my daddy is playing Resistance 2, and he screams at them too.

Unable to come to a decision, my daddy made the mistake of letting me choose the film that he saw a few weeks ago. He did this by carving cheese in the shape of a symbolic representation of a film, and letting me choose by whichever piece of cheese I ate first. His friend Nathan carved this one in the shape of an international bank:

and daddy carved one in the shape of hockey mask for Friday the 13th

Cheese is a difficult medium. At least that was their excuse.

Incidentally, they also made one in the shape of a shopping bag for Confessions of a Shopoholic, but found out that it wasn’t playing at the right time, whatever ‘time’ is, so we had a do-over with just The International and Friday the 13th.

You may be wondering why I chose The International, Tom Tykver’s latest attempt to prove that the very promising Run Lola Run was not a fluke (it was). I am not wondering, since, being in a perpetual state of confusion, either I am wondering about nothing, or everything, which amounts to the same thing. In either case, it should be obvious. I needed to communicate this feeling of not know what the hell is going on, and if any film was going to do that, it was The International.

Banks are in business to make money. In the logical world, a bank will charge 1% on credit cards and make billions. In The International, a bank will instead trade arms to African nations at extremely high risk and almost no profit. They’re evil, it seems. And you’re confused by The International’s choice to do the latter, then you know what it’s like to be me.

Something to chew.

In the real world, products are made by a variety of companies. If, for example, you met someone who didn’t want to trade guns with you, you could, say, go to one of the billion other people who sell guns. In The International, what you’re going to do is kill said guy. But not just kill him. You’re going hire one assassin to miss the target, and another assassin to hit the target, and make it look like the first guy did it, then bribe the police to kill the first guy and make it look like a political assassination, instead of, say, just having the first guy shoot him making any conspiracy impossible to prove. It makes me confused just to talk about it, and I’m a dachshund.

Aha, thought Daddy. These preposterous set-ups and improbable motivations serve the plot of the movie. I’m not confused; it’s just bad filmmaking. But then it was finally revealed why I choose The International. During the only fun bit – a shoot-out in the Guggenheim, during which 1) a lot of art was destroyed, and 2) my daddy, or Nathan, depending on whose story you believe, was heard to utter “So that’s what art is for” – our hero is trying to rescue the only man who can tell him: who is behind this conspiracy.

After much gunfire, and the pleasurable destruction of that overrated modernist piece of trash (according to me, a tiny and adorable dachshund, not Scott, who would never say such a thing), the man dies. So our hero goes down the street and asks the other guy, who tells him, thus rendering the preceding sequence entirely pointless. There is no plot to serve. The confusion, as it is for a dachshund, is in service of nothing. Evil, it turns out, isn’t so much evil, as it is totally unmotivated and inexplicable.

Where are the badgers indeed.