If Ball — who regularly toyed with conventions in his TV show [Six Feet Under] and in "American Beauty" — thought all this would somehow illuminate the tragedy of child abuse, he was wrong. Too much is shown and too many lines are crossed for "Nothing Is Private" ever to be released by a major studio or distribution company to theatres. If nothing else, the endless "ick" factor involving nearly every character is a permanent obstacle.
...
"Nothing Is Private" comes within a year of "Hounddog," the film in which a 12-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning) is raped on screen. Of course, in that case it was really a 12-year-old. But something has definitely happened -- a change has occurred in the mindset of filmmakers who no longer see anything wrong with these depictions. How wrong they are.
Read more.
...
"Nothing Is Private" comes within a year of "Hounddog," the film in which a 12-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning) is raped on screen. Of course, in that case it was really a 12-year-old. But something has definitely happened -- a change has occurred in the mindset of filmmakers who no longer see anything wrong with these depictions. How wrong they are.
Read more.
1 comment:
Sadly, 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 (sodomy) - not to mention completely made up facts about characters. For 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. Anyone who came out of that film thinking Rifat was Iraqi must have slept through it. 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.
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.
This is how urban myths get started. No different than the people who castigated "the Passion" for supposed anti-Semitism without ever having seen it.
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.
"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
Post a Comment