“Lovelace,” with Amanda Seyfried as porn star Linda Lovelace, is just one of many skin flicks debuting at Sundance in conservative Utah. (
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America’s most G-rated state has gone triple-X. Let 2013 be known as the year Sundance turned into Porndance.
At least five porn-centric movies are playing — and all of them are among the most-talked-about titles at a festival normally associated with anguished kitchen-sink dramas. Major Hollywood names are involved, including James Franco, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Amanda Seyfried.
Franco, who on March 8 will be seen as the title character in Disney’s big-budget “Oz: The Great and Powerful,” has made no secret of having mixed feelings about being the star of a kids’ movie. He brought two bonkbusters to Sundance — both about S&M.
He co-directed “Interior. Leather Bar.,” a film inspired by rumors that hard-core footage had to be cut out of the 1980 Al Pacino movie “Cruising” in order to avoid an X rating. The 60-minute film intercuts scenes of Franco musing about his drive to explore the outer limits of screen sexuality with footage that looks like the parts of “Cruising” in which the undercover cop played by Pacino (this time with actor Val Lauren filling in) hangs out in downtown’s wildest gay bars. The film’s explicit gay sex would surely earn an X if the film were ever submitted for a rating, although Franco isn’t in any sex scenes.
“Every f – – king love story is a dude that wants to be with a girl, and the only way they’re going to end up happy is if they walk off into the sunset together,” Franco says in the film. “I’m f – – king sick of that s – – t.”
“Kink,” a documentary about porn factory kink.com, was produced by Franco. Noted one blogger, “Sure, it can be kind of awkward to see women hung upside down while being stimulated by giant industrial-sized machines, especially in a crowd of a couple hundred festival goers.” So: Not a date movie, then?
Franco also plays Hugh Hefner in “Lovelace,” the story of “Deep Throat” star Linda Lovelace with Amanda Seyfried.
The Hugh Hefner of England, Paul Raymond, is another porny presence. He’s played by Steve Coogan in “The Look of Love,” a Brit “Boogie Nights” about Raymond’s nudie-club and men’s-magazine empire. The film features wall-to-wall naked flesh, as does Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut, “Don Jon’s Addiction.” Gordon-Levitt also stars as a brainless New Jersey bartender who prefers porn to real sex with his girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson, who shows less skin than her co-star).
Even the Sundance films that aren’t about porn push sexual boundaries. In “Two Mothers,” Naomi Watts and Robin Wright play best friends who, with each other’s full approval, have affairs with each other’s teenage sons. In “The Lifeguard,” a 29-year-old New York woman has an affair with a 16-year-old Connecticut schoolboy, and “Kill Your Darlings,” a 1940s period piece set at Columbia University starring Daniel Radcliffe as poet Allen Ginsberg, is surprisingly sexually explicit. That last one occasioned the memorable Huffington Post headline “Why Is Harry Potter Having Gay Beatnik Sex?” (Answer: Why not?)
So where is the pushback in this deep-red state? Nowhere. Though Utah taxpayers are funding Porndance (Sundance receives public financing from several government entities in the state, plus federal funding from such agencies as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities), the only trace of protest anyone could locate was . . . a polite blog entry. A little-known outfit called “The Sutherland Institute” feebly requested taxpayers not be made to pay for porn produced by Hollywood millionaires.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Sundance laughed off this tepid complaint: No one even noticed.