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Censor's Moon
Mar. 4th, 2007 02:16 pmBefore 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?
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?
