Everybody complains that big Hollywood movies don't show enough awareness of current events, but a lot of people get just as uncomfortable when their escapist entertainments seem to be getting to close to reminding them of what they were hoping to get their minds off when they fled to the theaters. Last year, a full-blown media circus sprung up in Britain around the still-unsolved case of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old girl who was reported missing from the Portugal resort where she and her family were on vacation. (The case received a lot of media attention partly because the parents actively sought it out in their public calls for help in finding their daughter, which in turn attracted shout-outs from celebrities.) One side effect of the case is that Ben Affleck's cracking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which happens to deal with a murky case involving a lost little girl, had its English premiere postponed out of deferrence to sensitive feelings stirred up by the actual case. (Affleck himself has said, "We are acutely aware of the situation... we don't want to release the movie if it is going to touch a Hooksexup or inflame anyone's sensitivities." Now, with the movie finally slipping into British theaters, Andrew Hubert does a quick run-down of other high-profile releases that had to bob and weave to keep from being overshadowed from actual events, in many cases unsuccessfully. Perhaps the most obvious forerunner to Gone Baby Gone in this department is The Good Son, which was made at a time when its star, Macaulay Culkin, was seen as having worn out his welcome as America's favorite twinkling child freak.
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