I've just seen the movie This Film is Not Yet Rated, a documentary on the MPAA and their ratings system. It's most entertaining, especially when showing filmmakers telling their own horror stories about why their films were given performance-crippling ratings.
It may surprise you to learn that the movie studios are thrown into a tither at the sight of anything representing female sexual pleasure onscreen. I know I was shocked.
The film makes the same points so many times that it begins to feel like padding. This is even worse when it starts to focus on the P.I. the documentarian hired to ferret out the identities of the very hush-hush ratings board.
Her story may be fascinating to some (though not to me), but there's no denying it's got nothing to do with what the film is obstensibly about.
Also, I question whether this film tells any of us "right-thinking" people anything we don't already know. The treatment of sex vs. violence in American movies is often hypocritical, I mean, who didn't know that?
However, it's a point worth making and the film makes it well in a couple spots. Actress Maria Bello and actor/filmmaker Kevin Smith are particuarly eloquent on this subject.
Bello describes hearing that it was a brief glimpse of her lower nude body during a well-fucked scene which got her film The Cooler an NC-17 rating. She "wanted to go in and fight for my pubic hair," she says. You have to like a woman like that.
Smith fans should be sure to check out the deleted scenes in which he imagines himself a 16-year-old girl going to see Jersey Girl...in a hypothetical world in which anyone went to see Jersey Girl, he admits ruefully.
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