Towelhead

The TMI movie of the year. There is far more in here about child molestation and, ah, "women's issues" than I ever wanted to know. I'm glad that we have greater freedom of expression in American movies today, but sometimes I miss the days where you couldn't even say the word "rape"

A horrid viewing experience.

Totally uncomfortable, but sort of the point. The real problem I had was that often it came really close to saying something important, but it never quite got there. Also, pretty improbable the way this all happens in like a week.

not good sign that i zoned out given its riskiness. dull, oddly forgettable.

I'm a big Alan Ball fan and I think people has been wrongly understand this film. Young (girl) kids out there want to understand their bodies and awaking sexuality. They have a free will what to do with, but the opponent cannot be fully responsible, egoistic (male) adult. It'll be no equal sharing. Kids get easily totally wrong values of sexuality from modern, twisted, patriarchal picture of sexies. They need right way guiding.

Is it good or evil i couldn't decide what it is. God damn pedophiles.

Nothing special about in this movie but love eckhart performance.

Interesting film, but tries to go too many places at once. Not that it's hard to follow.

With Towelhead, Ball cements his obsession surrounding teen sexuality. 18 year-old Bishil portrays a convincing 13 year-old; Macdissi a finicky, overcompensating Lebanse-American; Eckhart a representation of male perversion; and Collette a representation of a nurturing performance. Therein lies the problem. While the performances are good, the screenplay reduces character depth and the plot is rather aimless. Still, the film has its moments.

Bad. This is a American Beauty wannabe that does everything wrong. I guess it was supposed to be a tale about race, sex abuse and sexual awakening but turned out to be a middle-eastern lolita remake...but you'll really only dislike this movie if you don't like watching an underage girl being rather explicitly groped, fingered and copulating with a leering adult. The movie made me feel very uncomfortable.. akin to watching a steaming pile of shit. Avoid like the plague.

Simplistic & fairly obvious, didactic coming of age story with some great acting & characters that could/should have been great, but for the clumsy dialogue/directing (not sure which was to blame).

Entertaining coming-of-age story about an Arab-American girl with terrible parents and weird neighbors. This is the first film from American Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball, but its weird effort to walk the line without crossing it makes it ultimately feel like a watered-down Todd Solondz effort. The acting is strong, especially from Aaron Eckhart as the morally ambiguous reservist neighbor.

While I appreciate the hard work the actors contributed to the film, I feel it is flawed on many levels; and coming away from the theater, felt that it was audience manipulation of the highest order without any kind of moral justification or story arcs to justify it. It feels as if nothing is learned through the characters' struggles, and the film's content is not just graphic, but tasteless.

This movie had the potential to be a great film.What we get is a film that uses the girls ethnicity to bring us into the film but never explores the issues it brings up about her sexuality,the racial issues in the community or her relationship to her family in any meaningful way.

06 Ocak 09, 00:20am. & alan ball cok iyi bir senaryo yazari. milliyetcilik, ergenlik, pedofili ve irkcilik hakkinda cok etkileyici bir hikaye. normal bir yonetmenlik ve basarili oyunculuklar ile ortaya yer yer sarsici, yer yer gulumseten cok iyi bir film cikmis. - irkciliga ugrayanin irkcilik yapmasi gibi hos ironiler ile hikaye daha da ilginclesmis. dedigim gibi yer yer sarssa ve seyircide igrelti olustursa da (kizin buyume ve cinsel aktiviteleri) sonu cok iyi baglanmis.yeni bir dogum ve yine..

"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." - Ed Gonzalez

Towelhead is the worst movie of its kind since Little Children. It's another adaptation of a trendy novel's contrived cynicism ('smartness' in mediaspeak).

The 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing.

Sex and the Single-Minded Girl: pubic shaving, first period, girlie magazines, masturbation, molestation, defloration, orgasms, condoms, tampons, or in sum, more and in greater detail than you'd care to know. The heroine's ethnicity adds a couple of extra ingredients (a Medieval father, racism), and the emergence of characters and their personalities, along with the formation of relationships and alliances between them, imparts a rudimentary narrative interest.

Like one reviewer has said, the movie focuses on too many issues in one single movie. A single person going through them, they just scrape the surface of these issues. The acting of Summer Bishil is really good, expected more from Alan Ball especially after American Pie. Its a decent movie but not a must watch.

65.000

This movie captures some of the angst and confusion that children deal with as they move through adolescence, and for dealing with racism. A shy and curious girl, discovering her sexuality, is not well prepared to handle the world around her. I loved the neighbor character (Toni Collette) who is one of the few good adult role models. Acting from Summer Bashil sometimes seemed vacant, but perhaps simply accurate for a demure 13 year old girl. Difficult to sit through but worth the effort.

I'm really surprised this wouldn't be considered highly offensive to the Arabic people. This depicts a 13 year old girl who doesn't even know what a vagina is. Tis just weird.

Bottom line is, Jasira, there are right ways to act around men, and wrong ways.

The ending of this movie was very disappointing, and left me feeling like many issues were unresolved. It was disturbing on SO many levels. American Beauty was MUCH better.

Nothing is private

this movie is horrible to watch, almost painful. It takes on way too many issues and never fully deals with all of them. This movie should have just stuck to one or two hard subjects, then actually deal with them in a better way.