..,.Gary Dretzka
..,.Leonard Klady
...David Poland
...Doug Pratt
...Ray Pride

JANUARY 23, 2007
You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound, Dog

Sundance is swinging along now. Studios are buying movie after movie like they needed to fill their distribution coffers without spending on original production. Hmmm...

The most controversial film of the festival, Hounddog, turns out to be not very controversial at all... except as an example of how to court controversy and then disappoint audiences. For a movie that has inspired a lot of conversation, it seems to me to be a movie not worthy of much talk at all.

The story is pretty simple. 12 year old with rough-hewn dad, hottie aunt and bible thumpin' granny is sexually curious and prone to fits of singing "Hounddog" while swiveling her hips, most often in beige panties and a t-shirt. Aunt runs away to join the circus. Dad gets dumb (how is a spoiler) and feminine, leaving the girl even more vulnerable. She is eventually raped. The Magic Black Man heals wounds. The Girl sings soulfully. Girl, you are a white trash woman now.

The rape sequence is not explicit... though it is rather stupid. Mamas, don't let your babies strip naked and grind to a man with bad acne for Elvis concert tickets. (Was that a song title?)

But like everything else in this film, writer/director Deborah Kampmeier, chooses not to dig into the very real pain of this girl and those around her, but instead to be poetic and simple and pretty and to rely on the audience's built-in predisposition to care about a child in danger.

It is, I must admit, a film that is filled with enough baffling choices by the filmmaker that in some situations, I might be inclined to see the film again and again, trying to figure out just what she was up to. But my gut instinct this time is that multiple viewings would not change much, except to show more holes in the work. There are some big turns that seem to want to ask big questions. Why does Kampmeier emasculate the father and disappear the putative mother? If this is a cautionary tale about youth and sexuality and the disregard of the family leading to real dangers, why aren't people talking about it being right wing propaganda?

In many ways, the movie is a 12-year-old version of what so many 20 year old pretty girls experience when they come to Los Angeles, escaping their f-ed up parents and small worlds with dreams of stardom only to be raped, literally or figuratively, by the town, with only the hope of eventually finding their true selves. By making that story with a poor, southern, 12-year-old at the center of it, it's almost as though the embrace of what is inherently controversial is another form of premeditated emotional rape. Sure, things like this happen. One can make that argument about 90% of films. But it is facile and intentionally misses the point.

Anyway...

Things have calmed considerably here in Park City. You can park on Main Street and pretty much everywhere else, though the gouging for parking at places like the Yarrow and in some of the city parking structures goes on. Small parties are still happening, though they tend to funnel down to the one or two larger ones as the evening gets later, as it did last night when New Line's The Last Mimzy/Bon Appetit dinner evolved into the last big party of the night... very civilized and the only place worth going in town.

In spite of films like King of California finally landing tonight, this is really the clean-up period of the festival when those of us left on the ground scramble to see the titles we have missed and to search hard for one or two final gems.