Towelhead.

"As with American Beauty, that culturally regressive lump of tackiness disguised as a sober-minded state-of-contemporary-society treatise that won Ball a screenplay Oscar, Towelhead (which debuted at Toronto under the title Nothing Is Private) means to provoke, to hold up a mirror to a suburban America riddled with sexual deviance and puritanical hypocrisy," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Rather, all it manages to reflect is [Alan] Ball himself - his obsessions and hang-ups haphazardly mashed up into a lopsided narrative that, though based on a novel by Alicia Erian, plays like a litany of his movie fetishes."

Updated through 9/13.

"[D]oes the film's allusive, almost intelligent end justify its abhorrent means?" asks Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "A kissing cousin of Todd Field and Todd Solondz, Ball suffocates audiences with a guttersniping view or suburban life, a Haggassian act of exploitation that misrepresents even the most fundamental modes of human interaction."

"Set during the first gulf war, in a spanking-new, upscale housing development on the outskirts of Houston, Towelhead is a crude but scathing portrait of suburban life," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times, where he also notes: "The movie is a barely disguised hate letter to southern Texas."

"Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation," observes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice.

"In presenting this multi-themed tale of a young girl's percolating sexuality and the firestorm it sets off, Ball struggles to find a precise or convincing tone," writes Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "As a result, the actors, committed as they all are, often appear to be operating in their own individual universes rather than as part of a cohesive whole. To be fair, juggling the story's pitch-dark humor, emotional land mines, sociopolitical checklist and biological bluntness would be a tough act for even the most seasoned filmmaker."

"Even [Summer] Bishil's emotionally naked performance gets lost amid Ball's insistence on rubbing our faces in ugly behavior without offering a counterbalance of insight," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

"Towelhead is the worst movie of its kind since Little Children," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It's another adaptation of a trendy novel's contrived cynicism ('smartness' in mediaspeak). It's another examination of the horrors of American suburbia and the superiority of a protagonist who represents a target demographic or a politically correct victim."

"Much as with Crash - and Ball's script for the overrated American Beauty, another Oscar-winner - the themes come first and the characters are manufactured in service of them, not the other way around," notes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

For Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, this feels "like a well-acted and well-intentioned after-school special, a long way from the vividness and texture of Ball's television work."

Benjamin H Sutton, writing in the L Magazine, finds it "mobilizes more issues than it can tackle intelligently."

For MovieMaker, Aaron Hillis talks with Ball about the film, "our society's sexual double standards and how the film almost ended up with a tamer title."

KJ Doughton talks with Ball for Film Threat.

Updates, 9/13: Bishil's "performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing, like an extended PSA about inappropriate touching," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "[T]he script is densely and fussily novelistic, packed with foreshadowing and metaphor and painstakingly highlighted 'themes.' Put it this way: When a white kitten named Snowball shows up, you just know he's going to symbolize something."

"It's a big month for Alan Ball," writes Matthew Debord in his profile for the Los Angeles Times. Besides Towelhead, there's the new HBO series, True Blood, "about vampires in Louisiana and the mortals who are both repelled and fascinated by them, now that the princes and princesses of the night have come out of the coffin and walk among the living, thanks to the invention of a Japanese synthetic-blood beverage, sold in six-packs. As it turns out, there are good vampires and bad vampires. Actress Anna Paquin is stuck in the middle, as Sookie Stackhouse, a psychic heroine retained from Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries books, the source material for the show."

At the Parallax View, Sean Axmaker talks with Ball.

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2008 6:24 AM