Hounddog.

"Writer-director Deborah Kampmeier was nearly run out of Park City, Utah, during last year's Sundance Film Festival after critics savaged her coming-of-age drama Hounddog, in which a 12-year-old girl, played by Dakota Fanning, is raped by a much older boy." Susan King talks with her for the Los Angeles Times.

"Few movies recover from such a hostile reception, especially a low-budget Southern-gothic tale set in 1959 about a 12-year-old motherless girl obsessed with Elvis Presley who seductively sings for a teenager in exchange for tickets to a concert of the King's," writes Julie Bloom in the New York Times. "But thanks to a radically different cut of the movie and the coffers of a new independent film company listed on the Nasdaq's over-the-counter market, Hounddog will finally make its way into 22 theaters across the country on Sept 19."

Updated through 9/19.

Hounddog "is not exploitive," argues David Edelstein in New York. "Not even close.... The focus of Hounddog isn't child-rape, any more than it's Elvis-worship. The movie is essentially an allegory - of subjugation and emancipation, of liberation through art. The vision is unsubtle but haunting."

"There's lots of talk about possession, emptiness and whites appropriating the blues, but none of it feels digested by the actual story," counters Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "That's because Kampmeier's hamfisted style, from her trite delineation of the spiritual and emotional lives of Southern classes to her obligatory pairing of apple and gloppy snake imagery, refuses to let Hounddog transcend the level of a cartoon or VC Andrews paperback."

Update, 9/16: "Kampmeier's handiwork has more in common with Lifetime movies for television than with child pornography," writes Leah Churner in Reverse Shot. "One hates to bring up continuity problems but in this case it seems the reediting is suspiciously bad, shuffled with a vengeance, as if to say, 'look what you've done!' to the world who wouldn't let Hounddog breathe."

Updates, 9/17: "Shot in mellow green and gold, Hounddog manages an engaging summer sweetness in its early scenes, as Lewellen plots to obtain a ticket to a local Elvis concert, but in the wake of the inadvertent betrayal that leads to her now-notorious rape (a sequence that, ironically, seems to have lost the horrific impact it needs), the film turns listless," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "By the time Lewellen [Fanning] gets tutored in the white-girl blues by a band of magical Negroes, it has fulfilled its risible potential."

Alonso Duralde at MSNBC: "I have no idea what the unfortunate audience at Sundance had to endure, but I can attest that what's about to hit US screens is a laughably lurid, vulgar parade of barefoot children, Gothic stereotypes, and 'Fetch me a Co-Cola' dialogue you thought had gone out with God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road."

"Ms Fanning's performance alone makes Hounddog worth seeing," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

Update, 9/18: "Fanning's performance becomes part of Hounddog's undoing," argues Mark Peikert in the New York Press. "Instead of the giddiness we get from fellow young thespian Abigail Breslin or the prickly vulnerability of Jodie Foster back in her teen heyday, all Fanning gives us is a steely determination."

Updates, 9/19: "The problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera," argues Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

"'It's a hard world for little things,' Lillian Gish says of her pint-size charges in The Night of the Hunter, one of the most sympathetic portraits of kids under duress," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York. "It's harder still for Dakota Fanning, the creepily committed child actor whose willingness to please appears to have been grossly exploited by writer-director Deborah Kampmeier."

"Like many a Deep South saga before it, the movie believes in the curative role of the blues, the symbolic role of reptiles and the strictly supportive role of African-Americans," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. "If anyone were going to be scandalized, it shouldn't have been the Catholic League and child protection advocates. It should have been the Humane Society and the NAACP."

"Ms Kampmeier has created a Southern Gothic tale in which the moral hierarchy has been inverted by attachments to religion, false righteousness, and wealth," writes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun. "But watching the world she has created fold in upon itself becomes unbearable."

"Pretty but overwrought, Hounddog doesn't deserve its infamy, nor does it merit being seen or remembered," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

Posted by dwhudson at September 15, 2008 2:21 PM