Kirby Dick's new documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a grinning grenade of a movie tossed directly into the offices of the MPAA. There are a lot of filmmakers who have a problem with the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of Jack Valenti's monolith of morality, but it took a fearless filmmaker like Dick to drag the debate into the light of day. The arguments likely won't be new to any cinephile, but it's a solid crash course for the layman, plus Dick adds enough to keep his film relevant and interesting even for those who know the issue well.
A lot of the value in Dick's documenting stems from the illustrative element that film, as a visual medium, naturally brings. It's one thing to listen to filmmaker Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) speak about the MPAA and their objections to portions of her film; it's far more striking to see what it is that ticked off the ratings board and realize that, hey, it's not anything out of the ordinary. If anything, it confirms the hair-splitting aspect of the whole system — if Chloe Sevigny's orgasm goes for five seconds, it's okay for kids with guardians, yet if it extends any longer, it's adults-only material.
Even stranger is the side-by-side comparison of films with R ratings and films with NC-17 ratings, which only compounds the absurdity at the heart of the issue. When Sharon Stone fellates Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct, it's okay; when Gael Garcia Bernal fellates a guy in Bad Education, it's dangerous.
Much is made of the MPAA's hang-ups regarding perverse, unusual or homoerotic sexuality - when Scary Movie, with its geysers of semen and penises penetrating ears, can land an R while John Waters's A Dirty Shame, a benign and non-explicit catalog of obscure and/or non-existent fetishes in which the only nudity is Selma Blair's freakish prosthetic breasts, gets tarred with an NC-17, something has gone awry. (It's also interesting to note that Waters himself scored an R for Serial Mom, which includes the sight of Kathleen Turner attempting to remove a disembodied liver from a fireplace poker. Violence doesn't enter much into the debate here, which brings up a whole other discussion of social mores, but there's only so much ground one filmmaker can cover.)
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Article comments
1 - tink
LOVE that you teased us with the chicanery behind the scenes of CARA and their rating rulings without giving it all away. By mentioning that, in order to get the bottomline, Kirby Dick had to put this film thru the very process his movie dissects...well, that just made me want to see it all the more.
all the best...
tink
2 - Jack Zeng
Really an interesting movie. as a Chinese cinephile living in Shanghai, I seldom know anything about American movie rating system and policy. after chewing this NC-17 again, I found it's hard to get everything fair-play, even in the USA.holp things will get better in the future, good luck kirby!