What If Dakota Fanning Got Raped And Nobody Cared?
Park City, UTAH – Don’t worry, Dakota Fanning is safe and sound. She hasn’t actually been raped. It’s the character in her latest film that gets attacked. And thank goodness, because Fanning is the best thing about the otherwise dreadful Hounddog. Although the film’s rape scene, which was filmed when Fanning was all of 12, has been getting so much grief (this morning’s Sundance screening in Salt Lake City was greeted with protests), it’s the rest of Hounddog that’s excruciating to watch. All the lush Southern Gothic landscapes in the world can’t save the contrived plot and on-the-nose dialogue that’s punctuated at every turn with lugubrious blues tunes and Elvis Presley songs in a sorry attempt to telegraph to the audience every emotion they’re supposed to be experiencing. Then there’s Hounddog’s Magic Negro — less a character and more a plot device — which is so thematically ill conceived that it makes Driving Miss Daisy look like Malcolm X. Set in the rural south in the early or mi
