Monday, April 02, 2007

Warning: Parental Advisory


This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Ever walk out of a movie and thought, how did that garner a PG-13 rating when it drops a couple F-Bombs. How many F-Bombs is too many before it gets bumps up to an R rating? That is the basic premise of This Film Is not Yet Rated, a documentary where Kirby Dick (I won’t point out the irony that the dude behind figuring out the ratings system is named Dick) tries to figure out how the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) comes up with their basis on which films get which ratings and an even harder task, who exactly is on the board that gives out the ratings.

The second is the much more interesting part of the film as Dick hires a private investigator team to track down these raters that are hidden in secrecy. These segments have a distinct Veronica Mars feel to it as the investigators involves one of their moderately attractive daughter to help out with clerical work and the occasional field work where it would be easier for an attractive young woman to gain access. But in a very un-Ronnie way, the mother daughter team is on the case over a month. And the hypocrisy of the raters remaining anonymous is that head of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, has stated the secrecy is to keep them from being pressures, but they are in constant contact with movie studios, the very ones that would have the most to gain from influencing the raters.

The other part looks at the inequalities between how certain films are rated featuring interviews with filmmakers that had there own wars with the ratings board including John Waters (A Dirty Shame), Kevin Smith (Jersey Girl), and Matt Stone (South Park). First is how Independent films are rated compared to one from the major studios. Keep in mind the MPAA are made up of members from the big six studios formed to advance the interest of the studio. So a major studio movie like Basic Instinct can show Sharon Stone in all her glory and get an R yet the independently released The Cooler gets an NC-17 for showing parts of Maria Bellow that is usually covered by undergarments. If you show heterosexual intercourse, you can get an R (well depending on the number of thrusts which leads to a funny montage in the documentary), but if it is two dudes: NC-17.

But the biggest argument, one that has been going on for decades, is how violent acts can get a PG-13. So in the mind of the MPAA, you can kill as many people, but as long as there is no blood it is okay. There is something significantly wrong with that yet the MPAA decides ignore all the psychological reports on how it violent images effect kids because they make more money off of PG-13 movies than R rated ones, which is the main reason they created PG-13 back in 1984 to get better box office revenue from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

The highlight of the film is when Dick himself submitted This Movie Is Not Yet Rated into the ratings board and of course got slapped with the NC-17 rating. This led to an appeals possess which is shrouded in as much secrecy as the original rating process. Once you get to this point of the documentary it is not surprising that the appeal was rejected, although getting the ruling overturned never looked like Dick’s goal of the appeals process.

I’m actually a big proponent of censorship as it spawns creativity. But it is obvious that the current system for rating movies is broken. The biggest problem is that the movies are being rated by the very system that makes the movies which sets up a big conflict of interest. Second is the lack of general guidelines and since raters are changed out occasionally, you run the risk of movies that could get different rating depending on who the raters are at any given time. It may be time for someone to set up an independent ratings board as the lack of competition has led the MPAA rate on how things suit their interests.

The Film Is Not Yet Rated gets a Terror Alert Level: High [ORANGE] on my Terror Alert Scale.



1 comment:

  1. Good review. I saw this last month (thanks to my pals at Netflix) and found it entertaining...not especially surprising, the hypocrisy of the MPAA is too apparent for that, but entertaining (in a bitter, cynical way :-)

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