« Previous | Main Page | Next »

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.