Day: January 18, 2007

The Globe and Mail‘s Liam Lacey today reiterated the envelope-pushing theme of this year’s Sundance Film Festival — “If you want to get people worked up, you can’t beat the combination of incendiary politics and twisted sex.” Lacey lists seven examples. Quick, without looking…how many can you recite off the top of your head? (There’ve been a couple of Sundance stories already posted in this vein.)

Heather Graham in Adrift

The films are (a) Brett Morgen‘s Chicago 10, “about one of the more inflammatory trials in American history, the 1968 conspiracy trial of the Chicago Seven, [using] music, animation, contemporary actors and archival footage”; (b) Hounddog (a.k.a., untitled Dakota Fanning Rape Project) features the 12-year-old Fanning “as a girl in the 1950s who’s obsessed with the music of Elvis Presley, [and who is] violently raped and appears, at different times, either naked or in underpants.”
Plus Robinson Devor‘s already-immortal Zoo, the “horse-fucking” (or more accurately, “fucking-horse”) doc about a 45-year-old Seattle guy “who made videotapes of himself being anally penetrated by a stallion and died in 2005 after an internal injury”; Adrift In Manhattan, with Heather Graham playing “an unhappy New York optometrist who participates in what Variety describes as ‘an eye-popping sex scene'”; the not-so-hot (according to one critic) An American Crime, a reality-based tale about a deranged woman (Catherine Keener) involved in the hideous torture of an Indiana teenager (Ellen Page); and Teeth, is about a sexually assaulted Christian girl who discovers she has choppers in her vaginal cavity.
“Compared with these,” says Lacey, “the merely obsessive stalker documentary Crazy Love, about a married New York lawyer who has been obsessed with another woman for 50 years, sounds almost romantic.”

Financial Times writer David Bowen wrote today that Sen. Barack Obama‘s announcement of an exploratory committee about his likely U.S. presidential candidacy via his own website “shows that the web can be wonderful, but only if it works hand in hand with the steam-driven world, so don’t go writing off newspapers and television just yet.”
Does Bowen’s view — obviously an old-media way of looking of things, but not without a pinch of real-world validity — apply in any way, shape or form to entertainment news stories?
“I know the Obama site exists only because I read it about in the papers,” Bowen goes on. “All the reports noted that Obama made the announcement on [it]. If they had not, what would have happened? No one (well, few people) would have thought to look for it. It would have remained just one among millions of websites that can be found if you are looking for it, but you would be as unlikely to stumble across as you would to prick your finger on that needle in a haystack.
“This may seem blindingly obvious, but it is a good example of an important point that is perhaps being forgotten. The web is a secondary medium. Obama√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s site may be a pleasing way of getting his message across…but only if people find it via a primary medium.
“What do I mean by primary medium? Simply, one that people will turn to themselves, or be exposed to without effort √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ≈ì a high visibility medium, you might call it. Newspaper articles or advertisements, television reports or commercials, radio ditto, hoardings by the side of the road. Indeed the billboard on a busy road probably wins the visibility prize: it is difficult not to see.”