DAKOTA FANNING - BUYERS SHUNNING HOUNDDOG

The controversial movie Hounddog, which includes a fleeting scene in which a character played by 12-year-old actress Dakota Fanning is raped by a teenage boy, is not likely to attract a distributor at the Sundance Film Festival, FoxNews.com's Roger Friedman observed Wednesday. "No one wants it after the terrible reviews," one distributor told Friedman. In fact, reviews have been mixed and virtually none have been critical of the handling of the rape scene. "This is a fairly generic, pretentiously artsy coming-of-age movie set in late 1950s Alabama, where the clichés are thicker than the kudzu," the New York Post's Lou Lumenick commented in today's (Thursday) editions. Todd McCarthy grumbled in Variety: "Aside from Fanning and the controversy, the film has nothing going for it commercially." But writer-director Deborah Kampmeier told Entertainment Weekly that her lawyers have been negotiating with potential distributors. "Look," she said, "some people are going to love this film, some people are going to hate it."

25/01/2007