Ball’s Film Stirs Love-Hate Reaction
This week, Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under”) premiered “Nothing is Private,” his feature-film directing debut, at the Toronto Film Festival, and the movie is drawing violently mixed reactions. The Fox News review said it was disgusting and that it would never get mainstream distribution in the United States, a prediction that was immediately proven off-base when Warner Independent Pictures picked it up. In the movie the main characters are Jasira, a young Arab-American teenaged girl (Summer Bishil), and her strict, uptight Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi), living in suburban Texas at the time of the first U.S. invasion of Iraq. The film is a coming-of-age story and includes a racist military reservist neighbor (played by Aaron Eckhart, pictured above) who sexually assaults Jasira.
Click here for a much more favorable review. I’m sure I’ll see the movie at some point, though I often find work of Ball — who has a rare and genuine gift for unsettling people — to be too full of overly drawn-out provocations.
