Trackposted to Pirate’s Cove, The Bullwinkle Blog, and basil’s blog, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
From the LA Times via the Sun-Sentinel:
“Zoo” is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as “the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible.” But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.
OK, you have my attention now. Elegant, and eerily lyrical, yet taboo. This sounds interesting.
“Zoo,” premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen “Police Beat”) and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: “I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it.”
Woah a minute. Sex between men and animals? What happened to elegant, and eerily lyrical? Exactly how does someone make a film about sex between men and animals and make it “strangely beautiful”? I have absolutely no desire to “conjure up the mood and spirit of situations”. There is no way to “aestheticized the sleaze right out of it”.
So this is what Robert Redford and his Sundance Film Festival consider art? This is part of the human condition worth exploring on film? Let’s see how this works:
HUSBAND: “Hi honey. I’m home.”
WIFE: “Hi dear. Did you have a good day?”
HUSBAND: “Oh yes. I watched a film about men having sex with a horse.”
WIFE: “Wow, I wish I could have been there.”
Robert Redford, Sundance Film Festival
