Movie Review: This Film Is Not Yet Rated

This Film Is Not Yet Rated: Torgo approves

Having grown up as a movie junkie, this documentary didn't tell me much I didn't already know: the MPAA is a semi-fascist, completely unaccountable, industry-friendly sham. They abhor sex but have no problem with violence. They show strong tendencies towards misogyny, racism, homophobia. They, in short, suck.

But sometimes it's nice to have your beliefs reaffirmed.

Kirby Dick, in the playful, Michael Moore method, seeks to discover what this MPAA thing is and how they operate. It turns out, they don't want anyone to know.

There are good interviews with directors like Matt Stone, John Waters, Mary Harron, Kevin Smith and Kimberly Pierce. There's a deleted scene with the director of Love & Basketball that's worth seeing, too.

Everyone seems to be in agreement, the MPAA is bad. Dick does a good job of exposing precisely why and how they're bad. He shows clips of movies side by side, one that got an R, one that got an NC-17, wherein the shots are identical. He exposes the ratings board as not being parents of young children. And he documents the movie he's making being effectively censored by its target.

The double standard regarding sex and violence has always been troubling. Some of his interviewees hint at this, but I think it's definitely a larger, cultural problem that has always existed in the U.S. The Puritanical roots shun sex but condone and promote violence.

I think of how this has affected me. Through the movies, I have an extensive knowledge of things like weaponry and torture techniques. I watched ten minutes of a recent episode of "24" and learned how to extract information from someone using a power drill.

Meanwhile, sex was always something dirty and forbidden. Granted, I was raised Catholic. But shouldn't violence have been something dirty and forbidden?

No, I was terrified at a young age of garbage disposals, because of a horror movie commercial (I didn't even see the movie) in which someone gets sucked into one. Another movie's commercial showed a child's room with a lamp with a large pencil for a base. I had that lamp, but was always a little bit worried by it because it was associated with that movie. I saw a review of a Nightmare on Elm St movie on the midday news once in which they showed Freddy Krueger coming up through a waterbed. So I was scared of waterbeds. I think it was Critters in which a guy slept in his bed with his arm dangling over the side. There were Critters under the bed. I didn't let one finger go over the side of the bed for about a decade.

And I didn't even see any of those movies.

I was glad to hear that the MPAA was making some changes in response to this movie. It's nice to watch a documentary on dvd and, by the time it's on dvd, it's made parts of itself irrelevant. Not all, but parts. Slow progess.