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 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.

Hard as it is to believe in this lull of summer hallmarked by the usual hot-weather popcorn fare, we're edging ever closer to fall and the major fall film festivals, and Cinematical Indie will be bringing you heaps of coverage this year. Labor Day weekend, as always, means Telluride. Last year was our first year to cover the Telluride Film Festival; the fest is unique in that it doesn't announce its lineup until it actually starts, but that doesn't stop them from selling out passes well in advance of the fest every year, as film lovers converge on the small mountain town and triple its population for the weekend.

If you want to hit Telluride this year and haven't bought your passes yet, be prepared to pony up the big bucks; the Acme and Festival passes are sold out already, so you'll have to score yourself a $3500 patron pass if you want to attend. And good luck finding lodging in town at this point, unless you also want to dig deep and rent a spendy luxury vacation home -- but hey, if you that, drop me a line so I can come hang out -- we can talk movies while soaking in your jacuzzi overlooking the scenic San Juan mountains.