Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

American booty: Alan Ball's teenage sex flick is the year's best movie set in Texas.

Article Excerpt
To those who would argue that all the verve, ambition, and urgency to upset our bourgeois complacency has gone out of contemporary American filmmaking, consider the following: In Towelhead, American Beauty screenwriter and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball tells the story of a thirteen-year-old Lebanese-American girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil) who is sent to her father's house in suburban Houston after her mother's boyfriend admits to having helped shave her pubic region. (The mother, siding with the boyfriend, tells Jasira, "There are right ways to act around men, and there are wrong ways"--and then promptly puts her on an airplane.) That the shaving sequence is perhaps the least shocking one in the film should give you a sense of Ball's fearlessness in doing justice to this dark, grotesquely funny coming-of-age saga. In the first 45 minutes of Towelhead alone, Jasira brings herself to orgasm while flipping through a porn magazine; watches her African American boyfriend, Thomas (Eugene Jones III), masturbate in front of her (the very boyfriend who, when he first meets Jasira, calls her a "sand nigger"); and...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!