Towelhead?  Seriously?  Why not camel jockey or sand nigger?  Just as well, of course. The writer must have been trying to be a little different perhaps. Well there was nothing different about the movie “Towelhead” in my opinion.  Apart from the fact that there was an extremely annoying and unredeemable Lebanese character who played the role of the teenage girl’s father.  Perhaps some might say an oversexed thirteen-year- old. But then again maybe not. We all remember how we were at thirteen.  From the writer of “American Beauty” I expected a little better. But then again “Towelhead” began as a novel written by Alicia Erian, not by Alan Ball. He probably thought it a famous idea to try and make it into a movie. You know, the suburban eroticism element, the sex drive of teenagers and the repressed desires of adults, seems to be Ball’s thing.  All that’s very well. I’m not sure what Erian’s idea of being different was, since this story was screaming “let’s be different in our provocation” and then millions of people will want to know what happened in the story!  

To me, it all seemed too forced.  If there must be a Lebanese character in the movie, let him or her be despicable, no problem, but let there also be a contrast available, or let there not be a Lebanese character at all! This movie might just as well have been without this middle-eastern ingredient. The father might just as well have been an American man, divorced, with a thirteen year-old daughter who lived with her mom in some other state.  The mom would still have been dating a guy who was hitting on her daughter.  The mom would still have decided to send her daughter away to live with her American father, and the daughter would still have been hit on by the creepy thirty-something-year-old marine neighbor, who still might have been married, and had a ten year-old boy, who she still might have had to babysit.  There still might have been porn magazines lying around in the marine’s bedroom, and she still might have discovered them at some point while she was on the job.  There also might have been a really kind and worldly thirty-something-year-old pregnant American neighbor who might have moved in recently, with her American husband. They might still have both lived in Yemen and were total tree huggers who saw the world through sun hued lenses.  The nice lady still might have noticed the creep hitting on the thirteen year old girl, who by the way needn’t be called “Jazeera,” (how many Lebanese women/girls are named Jazeera in Lebanon??)  I mean at least get the names to be a little more authentic!  Anyway, so Jazeera might just as well have been a Jennifer or a Melissa, and she might have been saved by the kind neighborly neighbor who rescued her from the arms of the molester and from the beatings and mistreatment of her careless father, who by the way began dating a Greek lady, who really could have been American as well, and he could have left his teenage daughter at home all these nights where she was the easy target of sexual harassment.  Although I never REALLY got the impression that Melissa, (in this case Jazeera) felt violated. At least initially.  She seemed quite okay with the older man’s advances and attention.  Now psychology would tell us that because she was hungry for attention from her parents, had no parental guidance whatsoever, and that at that tender age of self exploration, she might have been craving any sort of male awareness, to make up for her father’s unforgivable neglect.  Of course, of course!   

I could wonder about the psychology behind this movie till tomorrow, no problem. But let me just slide in here how strange I found it that she never even felt violated until the nice kind lady gave her a scientific book about sexual maturation, where she actually fell upon a paragraph that yelled “Rape!” that poor Jazeera had her grand epiphany.  She needed a book to tell her how she must have naturally felt about her body.  In any case, that’s not really the problem. 

My whole issue is this:  Take out the Lebanese father and the movie would have been just another coming of age clip of an abandoned teenage girl.  And then the movie probably wouldn’t have been so intriguing and I wouldn’t have cared enough to pay $ 4.99 to get it from my On Demand cable option.  But I did.  And now I feel extremely let down.  I mean at least get a decent actor to play the role of the idiot Lebanese father if there really MUST be that middle eastern element, which I repeat, had no real purpose in the movie at all.  It didn’t bring forth or take away anything.  Oh, one thing though, he was a horrible Christian Arab. Now that, I have to admit, was refreshing.