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MovieMantz Rantz: 'Dog' Days At Sundance
by Scott Mantz, film critic
I'm still up at Sundance, but I just had to weigh in on an issue that's been bugging me for days.
By now, everyone who reads the trades has heard of the controversial movie "Hounddog," starring 12-year-old Dakota Fanning as a poverty-stricken southern girl who is raped by a teenage boy. Most of the articles I've read state that the rape scene was "tastefully done."
Pardon me, but when was the last time you ever heard the word "tasteful" used to describe a rape scene? Sorry, but there's nothing tasteful about it, whether the woman in question being raped is 8 or 80.
But that's beside the point, since the rape scene is tame compared to the fact that "Hounddog" is quite simply one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
It's slow as hell, it has no plot, it's filled to the rim with Southern clichés and, really, it has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Yes, Dakota Fanning gives it her all, but she wastes her committed performance in a film that's best left off of her otherwise extremely impressive resume.
I'll even go so far as to admit that sitting through "Hounddog" forced me to do something I've done only three other times in my life: I walked out. ("Freddie Got Fingered," "Deck The Halls" and fellow Sundance film "Summer Rain" were the others).
After the rape scene, which occurred about two-thirds of the way through, I kept waiting for something to happen; waiting for the big point of the plot to finally be revealed. It never was, so I was outta there.
But that's the way it is at Sundance. It's hit-or-miss. Fortunately, my hits were bigger than my misses. In fact, I loved "Waitress," featuring a standout performance from a never-better Keri Russell, and "In the Shadow of the Moon," a fascinating documentary about the moon landings as told by the surviving Apollo astronauts.
So at least I have more good Sundance memories than bad ones.
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