Just over a year ago, we told you about a film in the works from Precious director Lee Daniels. Sophia Vergara of Modern Family fame was set to star in the story of a Miami Times reporter who gets wrapped up in a homicide case.
That film, titled The Paperboy, debuted at Cannes yesterday, but with Nicole Kidman, not Vergara, in the starring role.
We think we might know why Vergara opted out: She's just not into golden showers.
According to Entertainment Weekly film reviewer Owen Gleiberman, The Paperboy inspired strong reactions from its screening audience -- some of whom applauded at its end, and others who booed. Which is understandable, since urophilia isn't for everyone:
The line on this movie in Cannes is the same one that a lot of critics, including me, took on Daniels' Shadowboxer: that it's so luridly overripe it's nuts -- or, at the very least, high camp. Certainly, you're going to have that feeling during the scene when Kidman, at the beach, saves Efron from a jellyfish sting by urinating on him -- which is an anti-jellyfish home remedy, but the way the scene is shot, I think Daniels had something else in mind.Yeah, we're not going to think too hard about the specifics of that "something else." Looking up the scientific term for a pee fetish is about as far as we're prepared to go for this movie, research-wise.
Of course, there's much more to the film than a little urinary relief between two consenting adults. Also starring John Cusack and Matthew McConaughey, it's the story of a Miami reporter returning to his Northern Florida hometown to investigate a case involving a death row inmate. Gleiberman praises it as a movie so realistic that it makes The Help look "about as naturalistic as a kabuki performance."
It's also one of several films, as the New York Times points out, that audiences booed, which then raised the very meta question of when and if booing a film at Cannes is okay. That's the mature, cultured issue at hand, of course. But we're having trouble focusing on it, what with all this distracting talk of pee and sex and Daniels instructing Kidman to "get some trunk in the bunk."
So we'll just say this: If pee fetishes are what's really going on in Northern Florida, consider us 305 for life.
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