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Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days | 2012 | PG | - 2.3.2

The third installment in the series: The hero (Zachary Gordon) is an eighth grader who wants to avoid the usual summer activities his family prefers. Instead, he decides to pretend he works at the local upscale country club, where his friends (Robert Capron and Peyton List) are members. Also with Steve Zahn, Devon Bostick, Rachael Harris and Karan Brar. Directed by David Bowers. [1:34]

SEX/NUDITY 2 - A teen girl allows an 8th grader to wipe away chocolate sauce sprayed accidentally onto her arm, with a strawberry, and eat it; he wiggles his eyebrows slightly and smiles.
 A middle school boy has a crush on a girl from his class; he tells his best friend and finally tells the girl that he wants to spend time with her and she smiles and holds his hand. A teen in a band sings Justin Bieber's "Baby" to a girl at her Sweet 16 party and she scowls; as he dances around her, they fall in spilled chocolate sauce and he asks her out (she rolls her eyes and says nothing).
 When a teen boy pretends to be drowning in a pool to attract the female lifeguard, a man jumps in, pulls him to the sidewalk and gives him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation; the boy shouts and cries.
 Swimming pool scenes at an overcrowded city pool and a country club pool feature boys and girls through high school age wearing bikinis or knee-length shorts. Two men at a swimming pool wear spandex brief-style swimsuits. A public pool's male dressing area is filled with overweight older men. We see the upper buttocks and buttock cleavage of several clothed men when they sit down on a bench. A teen boy wearing only shorts is shown sleeping. A 13-year-old wears a very short skirt for tennis and a white blouse that shows her bra through the thin fabric. A boy sits on a toilet at home in a side view and we see his bare thighs and lower legs.
 A middle-schooler falls off a high dive and loses his swimming shorts; he is embarrassed by his nudity when friends swim up to him (we do not see anything) and he grabs a pair of girl's swim trunks with "Princess" written on the back to get out of the pool, and he walks quite a distance to where his shorts were thrown by another child as people stare and laugh. Two short cartoons feature a boy wearing a tutu while dancing among butterflies (implying wimpiness)
 An 8th grade girl wearing a wedding band tells friends that she got married over the summer. Two teenage girls rudely tell the attractive 8th-grade sister of one of the girls that she will never be pretty.

VIOLENCE/GORE 3 - A boy at a friend's house accidentally calls 911 and when two police officers arrive they slam a male adult answering the door to the ground -- the man is holding a bread knife from dinner, where he was cutting servings.
 A boy's school promotional DVD features a stern teacher swatting a young boy on the back of the head to make him pay attention and the boys are shown wearing ankle monitors; at the school, we see a line of boys wearing suits, doing pushups on the sidewalk while an older student stands with one foot on the back of one of the other boys. A neighbor bullies another man in the neighborhood, belittling him and offering criticisms; the second man finally becomes angry in one scene and tells the bully to shut up. A husband and his wife argue briefly several times. A man argues with both of his teen sons several times.
 While camping, a boy slams his dad's hand with a mallet when he reaches into their tent (the man yells in pain, though we see no damage). A boy tells a ghost story at a campfire, speaking of a disembodied hand, blood and missing boy scouts until a scoutmaster appears suddenly wearing a black cloak, sticks out one pale hand, snarls and scares the group.
 A teen boy eggs the front door of a house, a man opens the door and the boy eggs the man as well; we see at least a dozen broken eggs, shells and slimy whites. A man is a member of a Civil War re-enactors' club and forces his 13-year-old son to go on a muddy battle reenactment as a bugle boy; the boy blows the horn without permission, the Rebel army charges forward with smoking rifles (with fake ammo) and they chase the boy down a long road. A hallway in a middle school is overcrowded with jostling, shouting children that are pushing one another as they run to the exits because school is out. In bed, a boy accidentally pokes the face of another boy with his foot.
 At a birthday party, a young woman becomes enraged when a boy in her high school class appears with his band and sings Justin Bieber's "Baby" while dancing around her and shooting off indoor fireworks; an ice sculpture overturns and breaks, banners around the band contain skulls and a ragged skeleton-monster playing drums, the woman grabs a mike stand and starts to swing at the boy as she snarls and shouts, a chocolate fountain overturns and she and the boy fall into chocolate (they are uninjured) along with a teen girl standing nearby, who is covered in chocolate and dirt from head to toe.
 A middle-schooler sees several young children in a swimming pool, has a panic attack, screams and runs out of the pool.
 A boy asks another boy why the second boy's dad never yells or hits him; the second boy says it hurts worse to hear that his dad is disappointed in him and that the first boy must be accustomed to being punched, because he makes so many mistakes. A boy asks his dad why he won't yell at him anymore and the father answers that he is simply disappointed in the boy's mistakes. A scoutmaster instructs his troop that there are only two kinds of people in the world and that they are predators and prey.
 A girl tells a boy she will kill him; they play doubles tennis with another boy and girl and the first girl hits the first boy with the tennis ball a dozen times and the boy's partner also hits him accidentally with the ball and with a racket; one ball hits the boy in the groin and he falls face forward, but is not seriously hurt and the boy also falls over the net and is unharmed.
 In an office scene of cubicles, one chair contains a skeleton wearing a suit. Two boys enter a haunted house ride and scream as skeletons pop out at them, they climb aboard a dangerous ride called the Cranium Shaker and become frightened as an attendant speaks of a student that was decapitated on the ride and become scared when they are stuck up in the air for several seconds, but descend unharmed, shouting and crying. A video game animation shows fires, dragons breathing fire and witches on brooms; we also see a large stuffed snowy owl like Harry Potter's in a classroom.
 Several boys build a spider web out of string between two trees at a campground and cover it with honey, and they gather biting ants and put them into the bedrolls of a group of scouts that are led by a bullying scoutmaster; the first group of boys accidentally knocks a tent into a campfire and it burns to ashes and smoke, the bullying scoutmaster pokes around his tent using a baseball bat, is covered by biting ants, shouts in pain, runs and falls into the web.
 A man and a boy chase a dog around their house, because the dog has their baby's blanket; they turn over furniture and break a lamp, the dog exchanges the blanket for a pot roast that ends up slobbery and broken apart, and the man cleans up the roast off screen; the camera cuts to dinner, where the man's wife, teen son and baby enjoy the roast (he and his middle son won't eat and look nauseated).
 A teen boy hides in a dumpster on the grounds of a country club three times and once is shown covered with kitchen garbage; we see him covered with coffee grounds, fruit peelings, meat scraps and wet papers. A little boy runs through a pool's changing area and stops to wash his hands in a urinal; he passes a man that is cleaning his toenails and several men that are shaving and trimming nose hairs, then gets into the pool wearing his shorts, tells a middle-school boy that he is peeing in the water (we don't see this) and we see a diaper floating away. A boy sees a man working on a laptop as the man picks his nose and wipes his finger on his shirt. Two parents and their son at an amusement park lick ice cream from the same cone and a boy visiting the family looks horrified. A boy tells another boy, "One time, I used your toothbrush to get dog poop off my shoe" and the other boy just yells, "What?" A boy sits on a toilet at home. A mother in a changing area picks up a used diaper sitting beside her baby, whom we see wearing a clean diaper, smells the used diaper, makes a face and tosses it off screen. A dog squats and seems to be defecating, but we do not see the result; a woman reaches toward the camera with small plastic bag, presumably to pick up dog droppings.

LANGUAGE 2 - 6 mild scatological terms and we see the band name "Loded Diper" on the side of a van, 2 anatomical terms, 2 exclamations (shut-up), name-calling (crazy, idiots, midgets, phony, wounded gazelle, losers, weak, little kid, shrimp, ridiculous, suckers), stereotypical references to parents, children, teenagers, nerds, mean girls, the rich, Asian Indians, bullies, youth scouting groups, 1 religious exclamation.

SUBSTANCE USE - Waiters serve drinks to club members around a country club pool and we hear that some of the drinks are smoothies that look like alcoholic cream drinks (we do not see the adults drink and kids drink smoothies).

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Appropriate and enjoyable summer activities for youth, volunteer work, family, relationships, mistakes, lying, bullying, forgiveness, reconciliation.

MESSAGE - Mistakes make a person interesting, if he or she learns from them.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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