Priceless PR

A nice little "scandal" is boiling up over the weekend. One of the sponsors of the AFI Fest, supermarket chain Gelson's, pulled their support and the 5,000 program guides they were to distribute to shoppers because one customer complained about one image in the program guide. The image in question is from Adam Rifkin's surveillance-camera film "Look." The irony is, whenever I'm at Gelson's waiting in the check-out line, I just cannot not look at the in-your-face covers of all these yellow press mags they are selling: the behinds of celebs with cellulite, the behinds of celebs who gained or lost weight -- obscene, sexist, silly, and boring. But as they make money with this stuff, they place it right in your eyeline. Such hypocrisy.

The film's description in the guide: "There are approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States capturing covert images of average Americans as much as 200 times a day. They're watching in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, public bathrooms — seemingly no one and nowhere are free from the dispassionate eye of the hidden camera. LOOK pieces together this rush of information, finding several provocative, interwoven storylines amid the noise of life in a random city."