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BREAKING NEWS
January 22, 2007
Sundance Takes A Grim Turn
Films about death, violence, torture and men who have sex with horses
PARK CITY, UTAH – It was merely the latest perversity in an opening weekend full of them that possibly the darkest of the Sundance Film Festival's entries – a strangely poetic non-fiction movie about men who have sex with horses – had its packed press screening on a brilliantly sunny afternoon yesterday.

Moreover, this being one of the most religiously observant states of the union, Robinson Devor's Zoo – which gets its name from zoophilia, the practitioners' preferred name for their inter-species inclinations – was probably unfolding as thousands of people in the vicinity were making their way home from church.

There was no question that the lurid nature of the subject matter, inspired by a sensational 2005 incident in Washington state in which a man died in a hospital after having intercourse with an Arabian stallion, was what packed the screening room yesterday afternoon.

But the most truly shocking thing about the movie was how strenuously anti-sensational it was. On the contrary, Devor treats the subject with a formally sophisticated and almost dreamy beauty.

Using audio interviews with both cult participants (some who appear in filmed re-enactments playing themselves) and actors reading from a script, the movie attempts to get inside both the minds and the desires of these men who feel what they do is simply an expression of their (albeit extreme) love of animals and sincere need to commune with the natural world.

While the movie never asks us to buy that rationale, it does successfully put bestiality in a disquietingly humane and even quasi-spiritual context. And, considering how sparingly the movie both alludes to and depicts the acts involved, that may be Zoo's most perverse aspect.

Zoo certainly needed to find a new way to shock festival viewers already treated to such outré displays of human behaviour as torture at Abu Ghraib, the torture and death of a teenage girl, the deaths of 200,000 in the former Chinese capital of Nanking, a vagina with teeth, a head being blown off at a hamburger joint and the murder-suicide of an estranged couple mourning a dead child.
Toronto Star


April 2007
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Sundance Films Point to the Dark Side of Social Mood
Category: NEWS
By: Pete Kendall, January 24, 2007
We are confident that we will see higher acclaim for Hollywood’s fear factories as the negative mood trend intensifies.
The Elliott Wave Theorist, January 2006

Toronto Star film critic Geoff Pevere calls this year festival “the most consistently grim in the festival's history.” Here’s his rundown of just a few of this year's offerings:
An American Crime, the story of an Indiana woman sent to jail in 1965 for her notorious role in the torture and death of a teenage girl.
Weapons, a movie about cyclical youth violence that involves cold-blooded shootings, rape and a ferocious bludgeoning involving a fire extinguisher.
Teeth, an aspiring cult comedy in which  a chastity-advocating small-town girl realizes she's unleashed a monster between her legs when she submits to carnal temptation.
The Good Life, a hairless young man in desperate financial straits due to his dysfunctional family and regularly beaten to a pulp by the local psycho-bully.
Snow Angels, a perpetually luckless man tries to make amends to his wife with an  unnervingly violent and “cathartic” ending.
Nanking, the story of the Japanese siege of a Chinese city in 1937 in which no amount of knowledge about the historic event can prepare viewers for the “testimonies of survivors heard in the documentary.”
Hounddog, a rape scene with 12-year-old Dakota Fanning in a sequence of sexual assault has created a minor media sensation.

Mark Galasiewski of the Socionomics Institute offers a history of negative-mood-themed films in this month’s issue of The Elliott Wave Theorist. The piece includes a great chart that shows how negative themes have waxed and waned with stock prices since 1920.

As noted here back in August, horror movies have staged a big comeback since the onset of the bear market in 2000, but the chart shows negative-mood movies actually declining over the last several years. As EWT notes, that’s partly because the source, Filmsite.org only includes films”that are highly regarded.” The positive assessment of negative-themed movies will probably follow in the next wave decline. This seems to be confirmed by the 2007 fare at Sundance as it is a gathering of independent film makers and thus representative of more avante garde tastes.

By the way, Zoo’s “shocking” subject matter actually has a precedent that fits right in with the current market juncture. The similarly themed play, Equus, a psycho-sexual drama about a teenage boys fascination with horses, was written as the Dow peaked in 1973 and came to Broadway as it collapsed in one of the biggest bear markets of the last century. In a 1985 Special Report, “Popular Culture and the Stock Market,” EWT observed that whereas bull market gender idols and characterizations are sexually distinct and stereotypical (John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s; Arnold Schwarzenegger and Madonna in the 1980s), their “bear-market counterparts are mixed and blurred.” It may seem like the lines can’t get much blurrier, but this is still happening with the Dow Jones Industrial Average running to new highs, suggesting that “anything goes” sexual morays have further to go.

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