TOWELHEAD

It's pretty late, and I wanted to turn in, but I wanted to write this movie out of my mind more. TOWELHEAD was a tough view. I cringed through the entire thing, right from the opening scene of an adult male offering to help a thirteen year old girl shave her bikini line--and the tuft of pubic hair that followed--to the closing scenes of painful, sweaty childbirth. Whose child, I'll let readers wonder--but you probably shouldn't see the movie just to figure that out. If the pubic hair didn't scare you off, maybe Aaron Eckhart creepily seducing a child will do the trick.

TOWELHEAD boasts a lovely lead actress, the formerly unseen Summer Bishil who plays the part of Jasira, a thirteen-yr-old girl attempting to invisibly navigate the hot beginnings of teenage sexuality under her strict Lebanese father's watch. And for Jasira, sexuality is white hot. What with nudey mags to excite her, a good-looking American Man of a neighbor (Eckhart) to bait her and a boy at school with lusty eyes (newcomer deux, Eugene Jones) to date her, what do you expect? But everything goes south just when Jasira thinks she's figured out this crazy little thing called sex. Because of course what we find--as we always do in movies like this, from THIRTEEN to L.I.E. to even JUNO and SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING CRAP--is that despite their bodies, these protagonists are just kids.

My annoyance with TOWELHEAD is that it seems to have no other motive than to show that. And I don't know if a film like this needs a lesson to be good, but it did seem to suffer from said lesson's absence. I just felt painfully uneasy for a couple hours, wasn't told why and then was ushered from the theatre. It felt like I had cringed and felt awkward for nothing. In fact, it felt like I had just watched THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS, and that amount of negative was not what I had been expecting. Maybe it's my fault for not knowing that I was walking into a sex...not romp...not farce...not 'capade...what would you call this, a sex drama?--well, maybe it's my fault for not knowing that I was walking into a sex drama instead of a mere multi-ethnic "slice of life" film, but maybe it was also the fault of the the film's marketing team.

So if you want to watch two hours of awkward sexual moments, go watch TOWELHEAD. If you want to watch two hours of awkward sexual moments and laugh...go rent AMERICAN PIE.

PLOT: A small slice of...sexual abuse.
THOUGHT: Too ripe for my taste.
IN FIVE: 2/5

PAT DRY: http://wip.warnerbros.com/towelhead/

(For the record, as confirmed by IMDB, Summer Bishil is twenty years old as of this July. Meaning she probably got the part at like what, age 18? Why, Parents, why?)