I finally saw Alan Ball‘s Nothing Is Private this afternoon, and there’s no question about it being smart, thoughtful and high-grade. It’s not 100% flawless (I had two or three speed-bump issues) but it’s certainly a sturdy, complex character drama that’s 100% deserving of respect. It’s obviously one of the most original, daring films about adolescent sexuality ever delivered by a quasi-mainstreamer. It’s also a sharp look at racism (and not just the American-bred kind) and a sobering portrait of the rifts and tensions between American and Middle-Eastern mindsets.

Nothing Is Private director-writer Alan Ball prior to today’s Cineplex Odeon public screening — 9.10.07, 1:40 pm

And all of this out of a fairly simple period drama, set in a Houston suburb around the time of the Gulf War, about a 13 year-old half-Lebanese, half-Irish girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil), and what happens as she gradually decides, under the fiercely oppressive watch of her Lebanese dad (Peter Macdissi), to explore/ indulge her budding sexuality with two older guys — a randy but nice-enough African-American high schooler in his mid teens (Eugene Jones) and a sleazy neighborhood dad in his early 40s (Aaron Eckhart).

It’s based on Alicia Erian‘s “Towelhead,” a respected novel that was published three or four years ago.

The word around the festival is that Nothing Is Private is a problem movie because of the sexual stuff, and the latter relationship in particular. (“It’s too shocking and disturbing to get a strong release…nobody serious will dare touch it,” one guy opined earlier today). But it’s not exploitation…not even a little bit. It’s a smartly written thing with all kinds of intrigues, balances and counterweights built into each character, and an earnest residue of humanity seeping through at the finish.

Even Eckhart’s character, scumbag that he is, has tics and shadings that make him more than just a thoughtless statutory rapist. Even Jasira’s dad, a dictatorial racist thug of the first order, comes off as somewhat sympathetic at times. And each one is his own way cares for Jasira. And despite the dark sexual currents (and as odd as this sound), it’s also a fairly amusing film. Really. It’s really boils down to being a “neighborhood folks and their quirks” movie that…okay, is a little bit icky in two or three scenes but isn’t nearly as icky in a general sense as you might expect.

Summer Bushill in Alan Ball’s Nothing Is Private

Ball is careful not to fetishize Bushill’s Jasira character in any way, shape or form. She’s naked in a few scenes (doing the deed, getting pube-shaved, etc.) but next to nothing is “shown.” Bishil was 17 or 18 when the film was shot (she just turned 19 last July), and Ball has been very, very careful about not including anything that might be construed as even a faint turn-on.

Her acting throughout the film is somewhere between fine and quite good for the most part, but she also has scenes here and there that feel underplayed and awkward. Plus she looks tiny as hell — she seems about as tall as a typical eight year-old — and that’s obviously discomforting, given the context.

And I wasn’t that big on Newton Thomas Sigel‘s cinematography, which is all shadowy and burnished and amber-lit. It seems affected. Surburban Houston neighborhoods are dull, flatly-lit places (I’m sorry to say I’ve visited them), and I don’t see the point of trying to make the film look like the Vito Corleone sequences in Gordon Willis‘s The Godfather, Part II.

There’s no distributor on board (as far as I know), but why isn’t there at least a bare-bones Nothing Is Private website? And why can’t I find any photos?

But this is a film that definitely deserves a better rap than it’s been getting so far. It’s Alan Ball-ish every step of the way, and for me that means highly observant, well-acted, piercing, occasionally trippy and respectful of human beings. There are two TIFF press and industry showings happening tomorrow, so we’ll see what happens.

“Conflicted excitement” sums up my reaction to Gregg Goldstein‘s Hollywood Reporter story about Sean Penn being favored by director Gus Van Sant to portray the late Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco supervisor who was shot to death (along with SF mayor George Moscone) in ’78.

Penn will give the part hell, of course, but it feels like an odd call. He doesn’t look like Milk in the least (he’s at least a foot too short) and there’s something about Penn’s gruff Irish machismo vibe that doesn’t feel like a good fit. But it’s an intriguing prospect. Good acting is about transformation, and Penn has shown time and again he knows a thing or two about this.

Matt Damon is attached to play Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who shot Milk and Moscone but was given a light manslaughter sentence (which outraged the city’s gay community, to put it mildly) and who later committed suicide. Damon seems exactly right for White (he gets working-class guys), although his participation in the Van Sant film is on the iffy side, according to Goldstein.

Michael London‘s Groundswell Prods. is financing the film, and Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks are producing from a script by Dustin Lance Black. Goldstein is reporting that “the filmmakers are now in talks with a leading specialty division to launch the project,” and that once a deal is in place the untitled feature “hopes” to begin shooting in San Francisco as early as December.

The idea, in part, is to beat Bryan Singer‘s in-the-works Milk biopic, The Mayor of Castro Street, which producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will produce from a rewritten script by Chris McQuarrie. Warner Independent and Participant Productions will co-finance. I suggested a while back that Adrien Brody — a dead-ringer for Milk — would be a great casting choice on Singer’s part.

“I [recently] caught a very early screening (no end credits whatsoever) of The Heartbreak Kid and I wholeheartedly support Lisa Nesselson‘s Variety review,” Pete Hammond wrote this morning. “The ’72 Elaine May original was great, but so is this on its own terms. And it is grounded in reality, which is why it really works. I don’t think I ever actually saw people literally rolling in the aisles, but at this screening one guy was doing just that. It’s going to be huge and in the case of one performer in it, there’s even — drum roll, please — Oscar potential. I’m gonna save the rest for my own review.”

Jason Reitman‘s Juno, a likably spunky sit-dram that gradually deepens as it goes along, has corralled attention via a Borys Kit/”Risky Business”/Hollywood Reporter item as a possible Oscar nominee. I agree that Diablo Cody‘s script might compete in the Best Original Screenplay category, but I’m not yet convinced that Juno has the gravitas or philosophical reach to qualify as Best Picture material. Agreeability isn’t a problem; this is a very smart, warm-hearted film. But in the end a film has to coagulate into something more than the sum of its parts.

“[Toronto’s] Four Seasons lobby is the place to ask folks like producer Ted Hope what’s happening with the acquisition of Alan Ball‘s controversial pedophile drama Nothing is Private,” writes Variety‘s Anne Thompson.

She then writes that the film “is challenging for distributors and needs some press support to give it some traction.” But how can there be much press support of the two Private press screenings aren’t happening until Tuesday? I liked Ball’s script and would love to see this film at the public showing the other night. But what was I supposed to do, chase down Hope and beg for tickets? Nobody’s flacking for this thing. Ball hosted a wee-hours party last night. Was I invited? No.

“A sampling of non-distrib folks I’ve spoken to liked it but felt pummeled by its clear-eyed look at some difficult material,” Thompson explains. “One studio marketing exec commented that she had never thought to see so much discussion of girls’ periods in two movies in one year. (The other is Superbad.)” In fact, the head of a distribution company told me earlier today that he’s calling Nothing is Private “a period film.”

“The confidence I’ve always had as an actor was never that I was so good, but that others were so bad.” – Into The Wild director and screenwriter Sean Penn talking earlier today to the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Whitty.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is “all in all, a grand package of hearty acting, design and action with the only caveat being that unlike the first film this [version] can no longer surprise us with its modern twists.” — from Kirk Honeycutt‘s Hollywood Reporter review, showing once again that one man’s dose of strychnine can be another’s cup of tea. Evening update: Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has panned it.

Wow…could the Farrelly Brothers‘ The Heartbreak Kid (DreamWorks, 10.5) actually work on its own terms, independent of (or indifferent to) the legend of the 1972 Elaine May/Bruce Jay Friedman/Neil Simon original?

Variety‘s Lisa Nesselson, having caught the new Ben Stiller version at the Deauville Film Festival, is calling it “a model of intelligent adaptation as well as a free-standing entertainment in its own right…[which] sustains a superlative level of comic invention straight through to final frames.

“With their smart, hilarious update, the Farrelly Bros. make mincemeat of the (often correct) theory that good movies should never be remade. Cleverly bending the template of the…original to their patented brand of profane gagdom, the Farrellys fashion a pitch-perfect riff on the consequences that ensue when getting hitched turns into something out of Hitchcock. Uproarious romp, grounded in believable if gleefully implausible human behavior, is a model of comic timing.”

Wait…”gleefully implausible”? Now I’m worried. Could Nesselson be an easy lay, comedically-speaking?

For me, the foundation of all successful movie comedies is that the basic material — plot, characters, situations, etc. — has to be at least faintly plausible, which is to say faintly recognizable and at least somewhat reflective of real life. (Every piece of material in Some Like It Hot, to name one famous example, is at least faintly plausible.) If it’s flat-out implausible, gleefully or otherwise, a movie is not funny. Sorry, but it’s that simple.

How is this supposed “international” Lions for Lambs trailer different than the domestic one? MGM would do well to put another, differently-cut trailer out fast. All Redford’s character (a college professor) does is deliver stern warnings. And does Tom Cruise (a right-wing U.S. Senator) do anything in this movie except loiter around his office and talk tough politics with Meryl Streep (a journalist)?

“I seem to have a homing device in me that leads me to absolutely every bad review that I’ve ever received. If I’m sitting in the hairdresser I’ll pick up the one thing that has horrific stuff about me in it. Which in one sense is incredibly difficult, but in the other constantly makes me go, `Get better! Get better! Get better!'” — Atonement star Keira Knightley speaking to Times Online‘s Kevin Maher, and saying something that seems to have actually produced results, considering her performance in Joe Wright‘s film.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford “is like an extended death ballad, an account of the final days of the famed Missouri desperado and ex-Confederate Jesse James that manages to breathe vitality into the western movie as a popular art form at the same time that it so magisterially administers the last rites. To a genre that’s itself been pronounced deceased more times than James’s death has been dramatized, we may have to make room in the tomb for another classic.” — from Geoff Pevere‘s 9.8.07 Toronto Star review.