In a New York Times article that oozes with both astonishment and unbridled adoration, Bellafante explains that Ball and his team have gone above and beyond to create "an allegory for nearly every strain of tension in American life." The vampires are gays! Religious wing-nuts are taken to task! Unchecked sexual freedom, embodied in that witchy woman, Maryann, brings only soulless destruction.

Ah, yes, the fictional town of Bon Temps holds up a mirror to the nation and demands, "Look at yourselves!" And Bellafante's giving the nation the benefit of the doubt by assuming viewers get the message.

Wood sat down recently with renowned E! gossip queen Marc Malkin to discuss her role as Louisiana's renowned vampire queen, Sophia.

The 21-year old couldn't really say much, lest series creator Alan Ball smite her, but she did offer titillating hints that her character will bed another female and, possibly, a man.

She's not necessarily a lesbian.... Her human partner is a girl, but I'm pretty sure she goes both ways. I think vampires are like that in general.

Just as note: Wood once dated Marilyn Manson and made out with Mickey Rourke. And that's all we'll say....

WHAT'S NEW: So Burn After Reading is good — more admirable than likable, really, with the Coen brothers returning to their parched well of overmatched dolts in possession of objects way beyond their ken. This time it's Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand attempting to blackmail a CIA analyst (a bracingly potty-mouthed John Malkovich) whose "memoirs" they've found lying on their gym's floor; Tilda Swinton and George Clooney join in as awkward archetypes of paranoia and aloof, striving America. If we sound glib, that's Burn for you — a plot- and style-allergic screwball comedy that succeeds primarily as an almost-clean break (even Pitt's character is ultimately a red herring) from two decades of recycled Coen tropes.

Alas, it's 20 years too late for some moviegoers, whose Coen aversion will keep Burn and its high-octane ensemble around $16 million for the weekend. That might be enough to surpass the De Niro/Pacino miscarriage Righteous Kill for second place overall, but we don't think anybody will overtake The Family That Preys — or, excuse us, Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys. The distinction matters, too: Even with 1,000 fewer screens than Kill, the dude is a box-office witch with a cult following and increasing crossover juice (Kathy Bates!) that'll push Family to $19.5 million in three days. Not that we've seen it — Perry doesn't avail his films to the press — but it's still fascinating stuff; we'll have more on him here later in the day.

Also opening: The chatty, mostly misleadingly titled Young People Fucking; Takashi Miike's acid-trip spaghetti Eastern Sukiyaki Western Django; the flashback-y Jewish family drama A Secret; the enviro-alarmist doc FLOW: For Love of Water; and Matthew McConaughey's shirtless adventure Surfer, Dude.

THE BIG LOSER: Here and elsewhere, we've made little secret of our disdain for Towelhead, Alan Ball's thoroughly revolting, exploitive, amateurish, illiterate and borderline retarded sketch of molesty, multi-ethnic suburban ennui. It's not worth getting into again — that's what Google's for — but look at it this way: Warner Independent Pictures didn't fold because it couldn't compete; it was poisoned. If you pay money to see this movie, you could be next.

THE UNDERDOG: Don't look now (oh, all right, go ahead) but The Women is up to a 9 percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes! The comeback is on! Sort of! Still, don't expect some Sex and the City blockbuster shocker; director Diane English can preach gay quadrants and underserved audiences all she wants, but she's only got her cast — not an HBO institution — to rely on. And how much does a Meg Ryan/Annette Bening/Eva Mendes/Jada Pinkett film open to these days? Not a ton, but more than most are predicting on 3,000 screens. We'll call it for $11 million and not a penny less.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD's include the hit Sarah Palin comedy Baby Mama; Tarsem's visually sumptuous Flopzterpiece™ The Fall; the long-awaited (we're serious this time) restoration of the Cinerama benchmark How the West Was Won; the 10th-anniversary edition of The Big Lebowski; and, extraordinarily, Child's Play: Chucky's 20th Birthday Edition. Chucky! 20! Christ, we're like grandparents now.

This is more like it, right? Is there anything better than a week when we won't be writing about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder on Monday? And when we can finally throw dirt on Towelhead's fetid corpse? Oh, fall. We missed you. Choose your own adventure, and share below.

But things got a little sketchier late Wednesday as Ball and source novelist Alicia Erian each issued statements responding to the CAIR kerfuffle, invoking their minority status to deflect the charge that Towelhead is anything but a cynical tug on the pantleg of jaded viewers everywhere. Their two cents is after the jump, along with a few reasons you should see right through it.

This ultimately comes down to the principals hanging themselves by their own ropes, starting with race-card shark Arian:

As an Arab-American woman, I am of course aware that the title of my book is an ethnic slur. Indeed, I selected the title to highlight one of the novel's major themes: racism. In the tradition of Dick Gregory's autobiography Nigger, the Jewish magazine Heeb, or the feminist magazine Bitch, the title is rude and shocking, but it is not gratuitous. Besides the fact that the main character must endure taunting about her ethnicity (including being called a towelhead), so much of the novel's plot is fueled by the characters' attitudes toward race. ...

This is not to say that I don't find these concerns legitimate — I absolutely do. We live in a racist society, one in which people continue to use ethnic slurs to delineate those who are different than they are. Realistically speaking, though, these people are neither the audience for my book, nor for the film. They will continue to use whatever language they wish whether or not a movie called Towelhead is released. For this reason, I am pleased that Warner Bros. is standing by the title.

Got it. Then Ball got loose with his homo creds:

As a gay man, I know how it feels to be called hateful names simply because of who I am. Therefore, I felt it was important to retain the title of Alicia Erian's novel, in which she so effectively dramatizes the pain inflicted by such language, something many people of non-minority descent never have to face. I believe one of the unintended consequences of forbidding such words to be spoken is imbuing those words with more power than they should ever have, and helping create the illusion that the bigotry and racism expressed by such cruel epithets is less prevalent than it actually is, which we all know is sadly not the case.

WIP threw in some spin for good measure ("Good Night, and Good Luck drew criticism from some as well") along with a few "experts," but first things first: The film was never called Towelhead until after it was roundly brutalized at Toronto under the title Nothing is Private; Warners lay low for a few months, quietly reclaimed the title of Erian's novel, and traveled with it to Sundance last January for a reboot of sorts.

Alas, Towelhead's intellectual and aesthetic qualities (or lack thereof; you be the judge Sept. 12) — not its name — continued to precede it through its abortive fest cycle, with WIP's pulled plug soon contributing as well to an early-fall dump. It's an institutional thing, really: Its sister company Picturehouse issued The Women the same fate, with Warners promoting both films in New York opposite each other two weeks from today — when 90 percent of film journalists are still up north covering Toronto.

So anyway, when Ball, Erian and the WIP brigade as a whole say they know about discrimination, we can't necessarily argue. But we can — and should — point out for the record that their exploitation artistry exceeds their sensitivity, and whatever lipstick they want to slather on their pig in advance of its release back into the wild is ultimately a waste of perfectly good makeup. Did CAIR miss the point? Maybe. But Towelhead got what it wanted. So, no — apology not accepted, gang. Off you go.

Both Twilight and True Blood have a very similar Romeo and Juliet-like couple at the center of their story lines — as you (should!) know by now, Twilight's main focus is on the doomed romance between the impossibly gorgeous vampire Edward and nerdy mere mortal Bella, while TB stars equally titillating Stephen Moyer as the bad boy blood-luster and Anna Paquin as the frumpy waitress who falls for him. While Twilight lacks a single marquee name, Ball's show not only scored Paquin, but recently added Alexander Skarsgard to the cast, son of Swedish sexpot Stellan. And Alan Ball isn't afraid of letting his cockiness show — in an interview with THR's blog, the Six Feet Under vet and king of quirky cool dismissed all those other silly vampire shows (all of which, like Buffy, were far from flops) by saying, "I think it's pretty lame when you let your vampire go out during the day just because you don't want to shoot at night."

Plus, Ball has the advantage of debuting TB in September, while Twilight isn't scheduled to hit theaters until December. But we think Ball's balls are a wee bit heftier than they should be when it comes to giving competitors the finger. Even if EW got it all wrong by depicting Twilight's leads as pale, hairy, and "too seductive" for innocent tweenybops' taste, sex sells. And Paquin, adorable as she is, just can't compete with the nubile allure of Twilight's memorably sultry trailer when it comes to pitching trouser tents.

• EW'S 'TWILIGHT' COVER BACKLASH [LAT]
• 'TRUE BLOOD' V. 'MOONLIGHT' [THR]

• Towelhead [Warner Independent]

The movie — so odious that many people have simply walked out during the screenings — shows actor Aaron Eckhart having sex with a 13-year-old girl played by a now 19-year-old actress, Summer Bishil. The actress only turned 19 recently, however, which means that she was just on the cusp of 18 when she made the movie last year. [...]

Eckhart, best known for roles in "Erin Brockovich" and "Thank You for Smoking" inexplicably agreed to this part. His character initially takes the girl's virginity by fondling her, in a very graphic scene that leaves nothing to the imagination.

Later, he sodomizes her. In between, his pedophilia is played in such a way that the first and only thought is that we're watching kiddie porn.

If Ball — who regularly toyed with conventions in his TV show 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.

We're going to resist the temptation to attempt to poke out our mind's eye with a meat thermometer based on Friedman's critical appraisal alone; after all, this is a film by an actual, Oscar-winning screenwriter who has certainly learned something about the delicate handling of potentially controversial sexual material from his experience of having his American Beauty script translated into an acclaimed motion picture. We're sure whatever early versions of the scenes that precipitated these reported walk-outs can easily be made more aesthetically palatable by the addition of a calming rain of rose petals or a well-timed cutaway to a peacefully floating plastic bag, changes that could defuse further controversy before its next festival screening.

• Kiddie Porn Movie Rocks Toronto as 'Feel-Awful' Film of the Year [Fox 411]