THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED = Doc of the year!!!

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 11/15/06 at 12:08am

Just saw this movie tonight and wow what a great doc. It's a scathing, incendiary attack on the hypocrisy and backwards thinking of the mysterious MPAA, which is the final and most difficult obstacle to overcome before a film can be seen by a mass audience.

Amongst the film's topics are:

- How sexuality is looked at more severely than violence

- How bloodless, cartoonish violence is able to score a PG-13 (Die Another Day, X) but realistic violence that shows the results and consequences of firing a gun (Saving Private Ryan) usually gets an R

- The bias against gay sex in films (The masturbation scene in the gay-themed BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER got an NC-17 while the masturbation scene in AMERICAN BEAUTY was able to get an R.)

- The strange fate of AMERICAN PSYCHO which got an NC-17 not because of Christian Bale's axe-murders but because of the threesome that occurred in the film

- Most interestingly enough, the case of GUNNER PALACE which was given an R rating for "Language and Drug Use" despite being a real account of the day-to-dayness of soldiers in Baghdad. "How do you rate real life? You don't look at photos of the bodies stacked on top of each other at Buchenwald or look at the naked Vietnamese girl running down the street and say 'Is this PG-13? Is this R?'"

- The bias against independant filmmakers

and most importantly of all...

- The anonymity of the mysterious raters. (The film eventually does reveal the names of every rater and member of the appeals board.)

Go check it out. It's a very frightening and entertaining expose.

[lildogs]

Posted: 4/30/07 at 3:29pm

Watched it this weekend--what I found funny/scary was that the old Catholic Legion of Decency is still deciding what's best for us--I have a VERY strong feeling that if folks in the South knew that Catholics and Episcopals were rating films, they'd have a fit.

I guess it's nice to know that some things never change.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 4/30/07 at 3:38pm

Great subject, weak doc. The director was going for a Michael Moore thing but he's clearly too mild mannered and doesn't enjoy the thrill of an argument enough to make it work. Way too much time spent with the adorable lesbian detectives. By the end, when the names of the MPAA are listed triumphantly across the screen, all I could think was "so what?".

[lildogs]

Posted: 4/30/07 at 3:46pm

It's not The Sorrow and the Pity granted, but I think it's eye-opening for those who care about such things.

I also think the doc is about how NOTHING is secret in America--that's the bigger picture I think. It didn't take them long to find all the names and addresses of those they wanted to find, which is amusing AND scary.

I'm not really sure there IS an argument Borstal--it's pretty clear the MPAA has no interest in debating the validity of its system. It seems like they're just some self-righteous coven. I'd like to see their Google searches...lol....