[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
Pious Perverts See other Pious Perverts Articles Title: SUNDANCE WITH THE DEVIL SUNDANCE WITH THE DEVIL SAMUEL L. Jackson chains a half-naked Christina Ricci to a radiator, a 12-year-old Dakota Fanning gets raped, Catherine Keener uses Ellen Page as a human ashtray, and worse - much worse. Yep, it's time for the Sundance Film Festival, which opens tonight with Robert Redford's celebration of indieworld serving an even greater than usual quota of tabloid-worthy shocking sex and human misery amid the snow and the swag emporiums of Park City, Utah. "Black Snake Moan," the Jackson-Ricci movie, has been generating buzz for months prior to its premiere, thanks to a pulpy poster depicting Ricci's bondage - and an even more lurid trailer of her trying to escape in chains, a cutoff T-shirt and panties. Jackson plays a former bluesman whose wife has left him for his brother. One morning, he discovers the slutty Ricci beaten and dumped outside his Southern farm after a wild night of partying - and he sets out to cure her of her promiscuity with some very tough Christian love before her boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) returns from a National Guard stint. " 'Black Snake Moan' is really about two very different people coming to heal each other," says writer-director Craig Brewer, whose "Hustle & Flow" created a sensation at Sundance '05. Brewer's film will open next month, but a distributor is still being sought for what may well turn out to be an even bigger hot potato - "Hounddog," which has been notorious since word leaked out that Fanning had filmed a rape scene for the movie. Set in Alabama of the late 1950s, "Hounddog" features the star of "Charlotte's Web" as an Elvis-obsessed singer who is ravaged by an older boy who entices her with tickets to see the King in concert. She also reportedly forces two children to strip at gunpoint and embrace as she wraps a snake around them. "There were so many stories I need to tell in 'Hounddog,'" says director Deborah Kampmeier, who was criticized by Christian groups, as were Fanning's parents. "About motherlessness, the cycle of abuse, the triumph of this girl's spirit and the power of female sexuality." Controversy doesn't automatically guarantee that a film will see exposure outside the festival circuit. "Raw Deal: A Question of Consent" - a documentary about a stripper allegedly raped in a Florida frat house - was snapped up after it generated front-page headlines out of Sundance in 2001. But its now-defunct distributor, Artisan Entertainment, ultimately shelved it, claiming the filmmakers failed to obtain music clearances. "Independent distributors live for challenges," says Mark Urban, of the indie distributor ThinkFilm. Urban picked up the controversial dirty-joke documentary "The Aristocrats" out of Sundance in '05 and turned it into a hit. "There's not any intrinsic value in a film that's offensive, but there can be value in a film that's controversial, which provides a marketing hook," Urban says. "That's what independent film is about, not homogenized product. But we all have our thresholds. "My feeling is that 'Hounddog' is going to have to be really excellent to find an audience. You've got to see the movie and decide whether it works." Ellen Page, the young Canadian actress whose character castrated a child molester in the jaw-dropping "Hard Candy" (Sundance '05), gets turned into a human ashtray by Catherine Keener in "An American Crime," another envelope pusher at this year's festival. Tommy O'Haver's film is based on a 1965 Indiana murder case that shocked the nation. Keener's single mother of six took in two teenage boarders - and tied up one of them, played by Page, in the basement. All manner of abuses are visited upon the teenager by this frightening woman, her children and their friends - as the victim's sister, who has polio, watches in horror. The injuries include multiple cigarette burns, scalding baths and violation with a soda bottle. "As a mother, I said to myself, 'I can't do this,'" Keener recently told an interviewer. "Later, I thought, 'I'm a mother. I think I kind of should.'" Two documentaries reach back even further into the past for stomach-churning horrors. "Nanking" recounts the atrocities committed when the Japanese army invaded what was then China's capital in 1937, when an estimated 200,000 civilians were slaughtered and some 20,000 females - some as young as 9 - were raped by soldiers, and often bayoneted afterward. The documentary powerfully combines horrifying newsreel footage with eyewitness accounts from elderly survivors. "Girl 27," another riveting documentary about rape, is set during the same year in Hollywood, where a young dancer named Patricia Douglas answered a call to perform in a musical. She had unknowingly been summoned, with 100 other dancers, to an orgy that MGM, then Hollywood's top studio, had organized for a sales convention. Douglas' accusation of rape briefly made national headlines, and she filed the first federal rights case involving rape after the district attorney, who had strong ties to the studio, refused to press the case. But MGM's lawyers made the case go away by paying off, among others, Douglas' lawyers and even her mother. Building on a piece he wrote for Esquire magazine, writer-director David Stenn digs details of this long-suppressed case and provides a measure of vindication for the elderly and forgotten Douglas, whom he interviewed before her death in 2002. But for sheer shock value, nothing may top "Zoo," which is based on yet another real-life case - about a Washington state man who died of a perforated colon after intimacies with an Arabian stallion. Director Robinson Devor ("Police Beat") documents a subculture of pervy horse lovers - who go to the stable to be the mounted. What would Mr. Ed say?
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 3.
#3. To: Tauzero (#0)
you have got to be kidding me.
There are no replies to Comment # 3. End Trace Mode for Comment # 3.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest |
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
|
||