Entries tagged with censorship

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Current Music: I Want You To Know - Charlotte Hatherley

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Not my finest hour

Oh dear. Came home from the park to change my jacket and brush my teeth prior to Poptimism, sat on the edge of my bed to empty out my pockets - and instantly fell asleep, in the process knocking over all manner of stuff. Whether we blame that on the jumbo bottle of pink plonk I had at the picnic, or how hard it was sleeping in last week's heat, that one has to go in the file marked FAIL.
On the plus side, after waking up at 1am and deciding against going down for the last half hour, I did manage to get back to sleep until, well, now. Which should mean I'm pretty well caught up.

Has anybody been to the orientalism exhibition at the Tate? I'm in two minds about going; I love the reproductions I've seen of some of the pictures, but factor in both the hideous lighting that place has at present (which I may have mentioned once or twice before), and my unease with the likely ideological framework*, as well as my general tendency to find single-theme or -artist exhibitions a little prone to diminishing returns...

For Salman Rushdie to demand the censorship of a book - defamatory or not, it just looks bad, doesn't it?

Hypothetical terror plot, inspired by the summer attire of Britain's less salubrious subjects, which I think is just outside the realms of possibility and too silly to use in a thriller, and so offer for consideration here: could someone disguise sufficient explosives as the crud under their toenails to do any damage? Possibly concealing the detonator separately in the guise of bellybutton fluff.

*"Orientalism is more than just a bad book. It is a bad book that legitimates bad politics. It is a great wedge of dishonesty that has begat a great mountain of ignorance. It is a treason of the clerks, an intellectual fraud that justifies bigotry and hatred."

Current Mood: tapir!
Current Music: Every Day I Die - The Frantic Elevators

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Censor's Moon

Before I get into the censorship post - SB would have been ace if it weren't for the mash-ups, the lunar eclipse was fabulous (the remarkable thing for me being not so much the colour, as that it truly looked like a sphere rather than its usual disc), I am very much looking forward to Jason Webley's show tonight even if it is in Shoreditch, and if there remained any faint chance of me voting Lib Dem again, it just evaporated.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a documentary by one Kirby Dick* about the rating system run by the Motion Picture Association of America. You know - PG13, NC17, those ratings. Unlike the BBFC over here, they don't ever seem to demand cuts - only to assign ratings. Now, in theory that's something with which I have no problem; while I'm utterly opposed to any film ever being banned or even cut, nor do I think that toddlers should be watching Requiem for a Dream. Except I was only dimly aware that if a film gets an NC17 rating, that means huge swathes of the US won't get it in their cinemas, and some of the megachains won't stock the DVD. Except I'd never realised how inconsistent the system was (the film shows clips of sex scenes from independent films which were rated NC17 next to near-identical excerpts from big studio films which got the less restrictive R rating), or how secretive the board is, or how it doesn't even live up to its own claims about how its members are chosen (allegedly Speaking As Parents of children up to 17, some have none younger than 22).
Above all, I hadn't realised what a sinisterly folksy mofo ran the show. Until very recently it was still in the hands of founding father Jack Valenti, a man with the same air of covertly menacing avuncularity as Buffy's Mayor.
It's not a perfect film - they have no sense of the situation outside the US except to consider homogenous 'Europe' as a liberal utopia for titillating films, for one thing. More damagingly, they seem to want to attack the MPAA with whatever weapons come to hand, whether complaining about the comparative tolerance for violent films, or about the lack of 'child behaviour experts' on the panel. Such 'experts' are at least as dangerous as 'concerned parents', as anyone who remembers the accursed Fredric Wertham will know. Still very much worth a look, though - apart from anything else, there's a scene where John Waters claims that nobody actually felches; I never thought I'd find myself saying "Bless, he's so innocent!" about John Waters.
Meanwhile on this side of the fishpond, "former BBFC president Andreas Whittam Smith defended passing two sexually explicit and violent films - Baise-Moi and Intimacy - with 18 certificates. He told the Synod: "However they were marred by their sexually explicit content, they had something to say." They were not *marred* by that content, you cretin. That content was their *point*. Both films were addressing issues related to human sexuality, a core aspect of the species, as art should, and without any spurious requirement for coyness which wouldn't be applied to other such aspects. Personally I don't think either did it very well I'm surprised there's no mention of the excellent, explicit Irreversible), but that's irrelevant.
Elsewhere at the same event: "TV shows like Big Brother and Little Britain can "exploit the humiliation of human beings for public entertainment", the Church of England has warned." As opposed to exploiting the humiliation of human beings for covert entertainment and overt social control like the Church used to, you mean? Upset that you're no longer the only game in town, are you?
And one cleric had the gall to say "My only complaint with Channel 4 is that they did not think to have our Archbishop of York on Celebrity Big Brother". This is another case where he either genuinely didn't know that said Archbish had been approached for the series but had refused (in which case the idiot shouldn't have been discussing the matter in public, and his opinion is of no value) or knew and was cynically attempting to mislead his audience (in which case the disingenuous toad's opinion is of no value).
Please note also, "The Church's General Synod, meeting in London, voted unanimously to express concerns over TV standards." Consider the near-ceaseless flow of utterly excellent television being produced by HBO precisely because of their freedom from petty censorship, and remember that unanimously next time someone claims that it's only certain factions within the church who would cast us back into the Dark Ages.

*And is it just me who sees that name and starts thinking about Darkseid's johnson?

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Current Music: The Story Of The Blues (Pts 1 & 2) - Wah

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Just for the record, I think I may have a little crush on you.

The Cat Returns is the first non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen (well, as far as I recall - it's quite possible some of the strange anime I half-remember from childhood afternoons was theirs). And this means that for most of the film I'm thinking, well, that was pretty good, but Miyazaki would have done it so much better. The way they move, the faces, nothing is quite in that perfect pitch he almost always manages. The lead has, I suppose, a certain similarity to the girl in his one mis-step, Spirited Away, in that she's far too much the whiny victim compared to Miyazaki's normal protagonists. And the plot...it feels too much like a dream, or an old fable, and these are subtly different forms to film, where the same structures will not suffice.
But by the end, these objections fall away - in part because the film seems to be getting the hang of itself more, but also because its charms are taking effect, and I realise that if it's not Miyazaki, it's still better than almost anyone else.

When I'm objecting to censorship demands made by scum, representatives of the Lost Left like to ask "Ah*, but what if there were a work of art which went against *your* values like that?" And I always say to them, well, there are plenty, none of which I want banned, and some of which are even really good. There are beautiful passages in the King James Bible, for instance (always helps to have Shakespeare on the translation team), and Hero may be a propaganda film for a vile state, but it's also a stunning piece of cinema. The film's message is that China's unity is paramount - there is a subtlety in how characters come to realise this, true, but its nonetheless made explicit that this excuses all manner of deaths and oppressions for the supposed Greater Good. And yet - the point may be vile, but it is never made artlessly. Within the film, it works. That may be a bubble world, a thought experiment which doesn't map on to the real world, but considered as art, it doesn't matter. The Chinese government and military approved of this film enough that it has 18,000 soldiers as extras - but considered as art, the main thing is that given they're playing soldiers (albeit of a much earlier era), this makes for some absolutely stunning massed scenes. And the smaller fights...you know how everyone got excited about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon even though the fight scenes had some really ropy effects? These are the fights those fights dream about being. They're jaw-dropping, they express character perfectly, and above all they are things of utter beauty.
So yes, it's poison. But art can be poison sometimes and still be wonderful.

Hoorah! Grant Morrison's Batman run has resumed! Boo! It's illustrated prose, and illustrated at that by some obviously computer-generated-in-a-really-nineties-way McKean wannabe. There are some great ideas in this tale of how the Joker's periodic self-reinventions work (and they have something to say about the world beyond the Batman and the Joker, which is where Alan Moore always says 'The Killing Joke' failed). But they would all have been much better expressed as, you know, a *comic*. And I've not seen Batman look less threatening since he was being played by George Clooney (who I still think, tragically, could now make a great Batman but will never get a second chance).

*Yes, delivered in the tones of Stewart Lee's Jesus. How did you guess?