You know those kinds of movies that you want to see, but you also know that it won't be a fun time at the movies? Well, that is exactly how I felt after watching the theatrical trailer for Towelhead. The film is based on Alicia Erian's novel about a young girl adjusting to her new life with her strict Lebanese father in Houston, Texas.

Summer Bishil stars as the young protagonist, Jasira, whose budding sexuality is either ignored or fetishized by the men in her life. Aaron Eckhart stars as a friendly neighbor who quickly degenerates into someone who should maybe have one of those 'meetings' with Chris Hanson; and the cast also includes Toni Collette as an understanding neighbor, and Maria Bello as Jasira's self-centered mother.

The book caused a stir when audiences were little shocked by the frank sexuality in the book (Jasira is a 13 year-old girl). I don't know if they made Jasira a little older in the film, but there is still plenty in the story to freak out conservative audiences. The film originally premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival and at Sundance under the name, Nothing is Private. I guess they figured the movie is bound to offend people anyway, so why not keep the original title?

Six Feet Under's Alan Ball wrote the screenplay, and Towelhead marks his directorial debut. Some early reviews for the film were positive, but, I'm still curious to see if mainstream audiences will be lining up for what looks to be an equally funny and disturbing film. Towelhead is scheduled for limited release on August 15th.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Towelhead (click on the image to enlarge), based on the popular book by Alicia Erian and directed by the very awesome Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under). With a superb cast that includes Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil, Towelhead premiered earlier this year at Sundance to a whole lotta praise. Personally, I didn't get a chance to see it and have hated myself ever since. Love the poster too; it has that dysfunctional cookie-cutter look to it -- not far from Ball's prior material.

Kim summed it up nicely when she wrote about the film from Sundance: "It's about the sexual awakening of a young girl, and the situations she gets into as she wrestles with her blossoming sexuality. Very intense, but a very well done film that a lot of women, especially, will relate to from their own teen years -- particularly the conflicting messages young girls get about themselves as sexual beings and learning to express that sexual power in a world where a girl who has sex is a slut, but a boy who does the same is just 'becoming a man.' Very powerful film."

Towelhead arrives in theaters on August 8.

Although I read Libertas and other conservative sites regularly, on the premise that it's a good idea to know what the barbarians are up to before they get to your gate, I rarely post about stories I read there. This piece they had up yesterday, though, is so blatantly misinformed and misguided that I felt compelled to address it.

The piece is yet another conservative rant against the liberal Hollywood machine. It starts out by linking to an article over on The Daily Standard, deemed by Libertas an "insightful piece on a disturbing trend." That alone set off my inner alarm bells, but I gamely went off to see what insights the Standard had to offer. In his piece, titled "Hollywood on the Offensive -- Child Abuse Hits the Silver Screen," Kevin Kusinitz starts out by attacking two films from Sundance 2007 -- Hounddog, starring Dakota Fanning as a young rape victim, and An American Crime, a dramatization of the murder of Sylvia Lukens in 1965, starring Ellen Page. Kusinitz then goes on to attack Page for her role in Juno thusly:

The Write Stuff interview series continues this week with Nancy Oliver. Nancy got her big break writing for one of my all-time favorite television shows -- Six Feet Under. She also wrote the script for the wonderful new film Lars and the Real Girl. The movie is about a young man named Lars (Ryan Gosling), his relationship with a sex doll, and how it affects those around him. Lars is in theaters now.

Cinematical: Take us through how you got your start as a writer.

Nancy Oliver: I have always written, since I was a little girl. I would rather have been a rock star, but that didn't work out. I got serious about it when I was about 21, which was a while ago. I had seen Saturday Night Live, and at the time I was acting in college, but nobody was casting me because I was totally wrong for everything. So seeing SNL, I started thinking I could do that. Alan Ball and I were friends in college so we put on our first show together and it took off from there. We had a theater company for a long time, and wrote and produced all our material.

Cinematical: Was the desire ever to get into another medium or would you have been happy doing that the rest of your life?

NO: I was interested in every kind of writing. I was possessed by theater because I had the means to do it, whereas to get to a camera is a different sort of path. I didn't head specifically for television or film until I had sort of already turned myself into a writer. I wanted to have a certain command of what I did and a certain knowledge of styles, and I just wanted to be able to handle myself technically and in terms of craft before I came to L.A.

Cinematical: And Six Feet Under was your first television gig? How did you get on there?

NO: Yeah, it was my first legit job. I had been writing content for the website for a year, and I had a job reading scripts for Alan. After the first two seasons, they changed up the writing staff, and I came on in the third season. We had worked together for over 20 years, but the job came as a big surprise to me. I didn't expect it and didn't go looking for it. And I was actually going back to Florida at the time, giving up on show business when the Six Feet Under job came through.

The long-awaited directorial debut of Alan Ball does not disappoint. Nothing is Private, based on the Alicia Erian novel, Towelhead, is an alternately moving and bitingly funny portrait of a Lebanese-American father and daughter who are lost at sea when it comes to understanding the country they live in, but no more so than their neighbors. Fans of the television show Six Feet Under will instantly recognize Peter Macdissi, the actor playing Rifat, the father, as the unscrupulous art teacher Olivier who was forever giving terrible advice to Lauren Ambrose's character on that show.

Here he affects the same kind of aggressively clueless persona, but with a stronger tinge of seriousness. Rifat, while educated and Americanized, is also a fierce traditionalist who slaps his daughter to the ground for wearing skimpy clothes, and then tries to recover by telling her "I forgive you." Summer Bishil plays 13 year-old Jasira, who is tormented at school by boys who call her 'towelhead.' One of those boys follows up that insult by promptly walking back up to Jasira and telling her 'You shouldn't let people call you that.'

Is Alan Ball's new drama Nothing Is Private really the most controversial film of the Toronto International Film Festival? You'll be able to find out when it hits theaters, courtesy of Warner Independent and Netflix's Red Envelope Entertainment, which bought the film for about $1.25 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Based on the novel Towelhead by Alicia Erian, the film reportedly includes graphic depictions of rape, pedophilia, menstruation, and racist dialogue. Fox News' Roger Friedman has already worked himself into a lather about it, calling it "the worst and most offensive movie I've seen in a while" and "the feel-awful movie of 2007." (What, he didn't see Bratz?)

Writer/director Ball (Six Feet Under, American Beauty) cast a young actress named Summer Bishil in the lead, playing an Arab-American girl who suffers all manner of abuse at the hands of her neighbor, her boyfriend, and her father. Aaron Eckhart (Erin Brockovich) plays the neighbor, whose actions toward the girl are despicable indeed.

The film has garnered enthusiastic responses, both positive and negative, and surely the distributors know that controversy often equals cash. Furthermore, it's the first movie to be directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Ball, and his first screenplay since American Beauty -- so it would have been a hot ticket even without the incendiary subject matter. No word yet on when Warner Independent will release it, but you can bet we (and Roger Friedman) will keep you posted.

After the Oscar-winning success of his first produced screenplay, American Beauty, writer Alan Ball instantly became a hot commodity, 'round Hollywood way. Despite the massive piles of money that were surely used to tempt him, Ball returned to his roots in TV, creating and then writing and directing several episodes of the critically adored Six Feet Under. Now that the series is over, though, Ball is ready to go back to the movies -- and he's directing this time, too.

According to this morning's Variety, Ball's long simmering, still untitled directorial debut has finally secured both financing and a cast, and will go into production in LA next month. The screenplay, also by Ball, was inspired by a novel called Towelhead, and its story revolves around "Jasira, who struggles with identity and sexual issues as the daughter of a Lebanese-American father and an American mother in Texas during the Gulf War." Though the girl will be played by a relative unknown (Summer Bishil) and her father by Six Feet Under vet Peter Macdissi, there are in fact several big names in the cast, including Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette and Maria Bello.

Monday's odds and ends:

• The South African press is reporting that two people involved in post-production on Tsotsi have been arrested as "key members of a suspected syndicate" that was producing and selling pirated DVDs of the film. On a personal level, the two men were in court this morning, facing "charges of fraud, theft and corruption." Professionally speaking, meanwhile, both are probably out a job, and have totally torpedoed business for Video Lab, their (ex-)employer.

• According to Production Weekly, worldwide writing acclaim isn't enough for Alan Ball (he of American Beauty and Six Feet Under fame): what he really wants to do is direct. To that end, he's chosen a nice, totally not controversial topic for his debut feature. Based on a novel called Towelhead, the movie, which starts shooting this summer, takes place during the Gulf War, and "follows a 13-year-old Arab-American girl who must navigate a sexual obsession with a bigoted Army reservist under the oppressive eye of her Lebanese father." Multiplex, here he comes!

• Here Be Monsters is a children's book so huge in the UK that even I, a childless American, have heard of it. The book's popularity (it'll be out here in July) led to a bidding war for the movie rights; LAIKA Entertainment won (they paid "significant six figure[s]") and plan to turn the story into a animated film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the book tells the story of "young boy who tries to save his town from a dastardly takeover plot," and is illustrated with hundreds of drawings (lots of them of monsters) by author Alan Snow and, best of all. Plus, best of all for LAIKA, it's the first installment in a planned series! Mmm ... franchise. The production will be overseen by The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, and there is talk that Here be Monsters will also be a stop-motion film.