Nooooo! We are extremely upset that one of our most favoritest actors, the amazing Aaron Eckhart, has chosen to be in a film being described by critics and audiences as "kiddie porn."
We are a huge supporter of child rights, and the glorification of child sexual exploitation goes against the grain of our very soul. :(
We freaked when we heard that Eckhart starred in Nothing is Private, a film about a child rapist by Alan Ball, the screenwriter of American Beauty. The actress in the film was 18 years old but playing a 13-year-old. We won't go into more details about specific scenes (the articles we've linked do that.)
We really liked American Beauty the first time we saw it when we were a teenager. But the creepy sexual scenes between Mena Suvari's high school character and Kevin Spacey's pervy Dad character left us really icked out. If this is the next step for Ball, making his underage sexual abusees younger and younger, we're sickened. Now, we totally mentally lump him in with gutter pervs Woody Allen and Roman Polanski.
We read a couple of reviews like this one. But we're super-interested to hear what Roger Ebert has to say about this film. We've read his review of Caligula and are expecting something starting along those lines, but we'll see. We're going to be monitoring this one because with the huge rise in child pornography (internet child porn - including live streaming video of molestation - is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry we are incredibly sad to report,) anyone who's aim is to desensitize the viewing audience to atrocities committed against children has our eternal hatred. (Reading the Fark comments about this movie was totally gross.)
The other big names attached to this film are: Toni Collette and Maria Bello.
PS. Apologies to Sam Mendes; we mixed up the name of the director of American Beauty with the screenwriter. Alan Ball wrote American Beauty and directed Nothing Is Private. We have corrected that error - thanks to Brij for pointing that out.
1 comment:
Don't take that FOX review too seriously - Roger Friedman of FOX never actually saw this film. There were so many blatant factual errors in his review it was apalling - references to incidents which never occured (such as sodomy) - not to mention completely made up facts about characters. For just one example, the father in the film is NOT Iraqi, but Lebanese, and the film actually takes great pains to mention that numerous times. It's a central point of one of the subplots. Friedman even spelled the name of the lead character incorrectly - it's "Jasira" not "Jazeera"" - though I suppose over at FOX they were looking to make some allusion to "Al Jazeera" just to stir things up.
Oh, and it was directed by Alan Ball, not Sam Mendes.
Friedman bases his reviews not on films but on vague mutterings he gets from people about them third-hand. I doubt he was even in the city of Toronto last weekend.
Friedman is the sort of "critic" who will pan a film without having seen it simply because the very subject matter or word-of-mouth regarding it makes him uncomfortable. It's a bit like trashing "Deep Impact" because you're vehemently opposed to comets hitting the earth.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because a film is about something that it automatically glorifies it. Now, the film may not be to your taste, which is fine, it deals with a very uncomfortable subject. I wouldn't bring the kiddies. But that has nothing to do with the morality of the film. After all, one must face demons to face them down.
And while it's tempting to think that any child molesters in films should be portrayed as raving lunatics with nothing but evil in their hearts - the truth is, most child molesters in the real world are trusted friends or family members. They are as complex as any other human being - that's not to say they're good people, mind you. But a realistic portrayal, uncomfortable as it may be, does a greater service to society than a whitewash.
"A movie is not good because it arrives at conclusions you share, or bad because it does not. A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it: about the way it considers its subject matter, and about how its real subject may be quite different from the one it seems to provide." - Roger Ebert
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