Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I don't know if you're like me, but when I saw the title CHACUN SON CINEMA I was like, "What the hell?" But then I realized it was the name of the film that played Cannes... bringing in tons of Palm d'Or winners to film shorts and compiling them all in one feature. I am happy to see this screening because the word out of Cannes was that it was only going to screen once at the fest and never anywhere else. I'm sure it leaked online, but who wants to watch it that way? I'm happy to get a chance at some point to see it big.

For more on that flick as well as Alan Ball's newest, NOTHING IS PRIVATE, I give you MCU! Enjoy!

I didn't need to love Nothing Is Private, but I wanted to like it a lot more than I did. Toronto festival co-director Noah Cowan gushingly introduced writer-director Alan Ball as the unofficial poet laureate of American film. For better or for worse, that designation is largely true after Six Feet Under and American Beauty. While I liked Six Feet Under and loved American Beauty as part of the Class of 1999 when it looked like American Cinema might be worth saving after all, the latter certainly isn't the *best* show of recent years and the latter doesn't have the staying power of, say, Magnolia (which I mistakenly liked less at the time, and yeah, I blame the frogs for that).

Anyway, with this coming-of-age/sexual-awakening story of a half-Lebanese girl based on the book "Towelhead", the biggest problem is that Ball just isn't up to the task.

It's handled visually in a very Hollywood-glossy manner, one which is especially noticeable during the (many) lingering shots of the thirteen year-old central female character Jasira as she's coaxed (often unwilling) through sexual exploration by male characters anywhere from a couple years older than her to three or so times her age. Not that I need all the exploitive situations to be "gritty" and "edgy" and "realistic" or for the multiple pedophilic supporting male characters to have horns, but let's just say that the way it *was* treated wouldn't have been my stylistic choice, and I'm pretty sure it shouldn't have been Ball's.

More disappointing is the writing, which demonstrates that it's possible to have imperfect, morally gray, and thus "human" characters who are still shallow. The great cast includes Aaron Eckhart (as the primary pedophile), Maria Bello as the selfish and narcissistic mother, and Six Feet Under's Peter Macdissi as the strict Lebanese father of newcomer Summer Bashil's Jasira. But in almost all cases the performances outpace the writing.

The audience reaction afterwards was polite Canadian applause, which livened up only after director and cast came up for a tepid Q&A.

Expectations have been high for a breakout sale for Nothing Is Private at TIFF, but I'd be surprised if that happens now.

But as an R-rated afterschool special featuring underage rape, some bad language, and bloody tampons, I guess it's not bad.

...

Better is Chacun Son Cinema (To Each His Own Cinema), a collection of shorts commissioned from leading directors for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. As I understand it, the only guideline they were given was that the three-minute films were to take place in a cinema. Most are, unsurprisingly perhaps, pretty good. Many are funny; a nice surprise is that several are strikingly poignant: a target missed by many short films that try for it.

I won't say who directed what, since the credit is usually given at the end of each short and part of the fun is in guessing, but some of the standouts are by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and Zhang Yimou, with hilarious pieces by Cronenberg and Polanski. Disappointments are a pedestrian shot-on-DV art film by David Lynch and Atom Egoyan's excruciatingly masturbatory contribution. (Where every other film seems to feature characters attending screenings of the classics of cinema, from "La regle du jeu" to "The 400 Blows", in Egoyan's the film is his own.)

Your pal,

MCU