NEWS STORY: Sundance Film Festival Features Sex, Sex and More Sex

c. 2005 Religion News Service PARK CITY, Utah _ The opening days of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival have borne a curious resemblance to the poultry section of a supermarket. More than a few turkeys are on display, as well as more breasts, thighs, legs and wings than you could shake an X rating at. […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

PARK CITY, Utah _ The opening days of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival have borne a curious resemblance to the poultry section of a supermarket. More than a few turkeys are on display, as well as more breasts, thighs, legs and wings than you could shake an X rating at. The films haven’t been especially wonderful, but all the sex and nudity have been so distracting that you mightn’t mind.

Of a random sampling of 12 fictional features that screened in the first three days of the festival, 11 featured nudity, often frank and prolonged, and scenes of lovemaking that ranged from the quasi-poetical to the outright pornographic. One film, “Nine Songs” by English director Michael Winterbottom, was nothing more than scenes of explicit sex alternating with clips of concert footage featuring various alternative rock acts.


And it’s not just the fictions that have sex on the brain. In two documentaries also selected randomly, sexual themes dominated either as a minor theme or as the subject matter of the most outrageously obscene jokes you’ve ever heard.

It would be natural to suspect somebody who’d selected these 14 films out of scores of options of harboring voyeuristic tendencies. But talking with people who’ve seen a completely different list of films gives the impression that the festival’s programmers have deliberately gone blue.

And blue is the key word, politics-wise. Sundance is widely known as a platform for progressive movies and ideas. In the wake of President Bush’s re-election and the clamor about culture wars and red-state-vs.-blue-state morality, the festival seems to have deliberately wrapped itself in the First Amendment and sought to make an argument for free expression in every frame. And the festival has staged discussions with such themes as “The Culture Wars” and “The Sex Stays in the Picture.”

With all the sex, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out you’re being told something.

Take, for instance, the film that was chosen to screen in the festival’s biggest theater at the end of the first day: “Inside `Deep Throat”’ is a spry and engaging documentary about the making of the notorious 1972 porn film that became a rallying cry for both censors and free-speech advocates. Though directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) keep the film consistently amusing, it’s inevitably filled with the very images that so polarized the chattering classes 33 years ago. It’s being released later this year by Universal Pictures despite an NC-17 rating. It went over gangbusters with the audience.

Not a lot else in the festival’s first days has. Despite a couple of blockbuster sales _ the hip-hop drama “Hustle & Flow” was acquired by Paramount Pictures for $9 million, and the crime comedy “Matador” went to Miramax for a cool $7 mil _ critical buzz has been tepid.

A few films have support. “Thumbsucker,” a sweet, delicate, coming-of-age story, had its premiere Sunday night in front of an enthusiastic crowd that especially admired the performance of young Lou Taylor Pucci as a nervous high school senior who tries a number of ways of coping with his feelings of hopelessness and confusion. (It was also the one feature film out of a dozen that contained no nudity.)


“Brick” captivated some critics with its gorgeous photography and clever translation of a hard-boiled Raymond Chandler story, complete with goons, yeggs and dames, to a California high school. Yet another high school movie, the scabrous satire “Pretty Persuasion,” aspires to the league of “Election” and “Heathers” but doesn’t quite get there, despite a stunning performance by lead actress Evan Rachel Wood, first noticed here two years ago in “Thirteen.”

But there have been disappointments as well. Actor Steve Buscemi, directing a feature for the first time since 1996’s “Trees Lounge,” delivered a flat character study in “Lonesome Jim,” featuring Casey Affleck as a man who moves back to his Indiana hometown after failing at everything. “Happy Endings,” a multicharacter comic web-of-life feature that was selected as the festival’s opening-night film, featured terrific performances by the likes of Lisa Kudrow, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jesse Bradford and Bobby Cannavale, but director Don Roos (“The Opposite of Sex”) couldn’t bring together the many disparate stories and themes. Craig Lucas adapted his own play “The Dying Gaul” for his directorial debut, and it, too, is built on wonderful acting _ in this case by Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Campbell Scott _ but it’s a cool, insiderish and explicit film with a needlessly cruel ending.

One film did, however, make at least one groggy viewer giddy with endorphins. “The Aristocrats” is unspeakably raw and brilliantly hilarious, a documentary featuring dozens of famous comics and comedy writers telling and discussing a notorious dirty joke that has for decades been a staple of behind-the-scenes bull sessions among comedians. A pantheon of comedy stars _ George Carlin, Robin Williams, Phyllis Diller, Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Carey and dozens more _ vent some astoundingly raw stuff that drove some critics out of the theater and left others wheezing with laughter in their seats.

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The film’s co-creators, comedian Paul Provenza and magician Penn Jillette, met with reporters Sunday, bittersweet at the thought that their movie coincided with the death of their hero and mentor Johnny Carson. But they gleefully pointed out the delicious irony that their film, which has no sexual imagery, no violence and, indeed, no conflict, is likely to be slapped with an NC-17 rating and be met with outrage in the predictable quarters. And this despite the volcanic Jillette’s insistence that “the red state-blue state thing is nonsense. NASCAR fans like a dirty joke just as much as anyone else. But there are, like, 17 people on the extreme right and the extreme left who will take a film like this and make an issue out of it.”

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Some enticing works have yet to screen: new films by Werner Herzog and Steven Chow, a musical version of the drug-scare movie “Reefer Madness,” and the directorial debuts of actor Kevin Bacon and Miranda July. And the weather, unusually warm so far, is starting to cool, with snow predicted for Wednesday.

Maybe Sundance will put on some clothes and get down to the business of amazing audiences.


MO/PH/JL END LEVY

(Shawn Levy is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

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