Review: This Film is Not Yet Rated

Completely fascinating 2006 Kirby Dick documentary about the often foolish, somewhat mysterious, and ultimately uber-powerful MPAA ratings board in the United States. It’s promoted as being for the benefit of everyone, but also as a tool for concerned movie-going parents, in reality the latter benefit often works against the former. An absolute must for film buffs, it has a lot of important points to make, particularly shocking is the part where we see a split screen of a male masturbation scene in the R-rated “American Beauty” (R-rated in the American system at least) versus a similar scene from a female perspective in an indie flick which hypocritically, received harsher treatment. The film in question (“But I’m a Cheerleader”, with Natasha Lyonne) was also a lesbian film, and gays receive harsher treatment from the MPAA, so when you’ve got a film featuring a homosexual woman pleasuring herself, you’re, um...screwed. A montage of gay vs. straight sex scenes follows, and proves really interesting stuff. So are these moralistic people simply myopic? Do they have a homophobic (or at least nuclear family-oriented) agenda? From what we are told, no members of the MPAA are professed homosexuals. Are they biased towards blockbusters? Ruled by the Church? (an MPAA appeals board indeed features two religious representatives, not just people with faith, but religious figures). One could make the argument that the answer is all of the above, certainly one could make the argument that the MPAA plays a big part in a film’s ultimate success or failure (you can release a film unrated, it’s a voluntary process after all, but say bye-bye to your box-office potential if you do that!), causing much heartache for the passionate filmmaker, no doubt.

What of violent content in cinema? Why is sex censored seemingly far more strictly than violence? Where has sex even gone from cinemas these days whilst violence is still common on screen? The sex vs. Violence debate is featured here when actress Maria Bello and director Wayne Kramer talk about the stupid original rating of their film “The Cooler”. I must admit that this argument goes a bit wonky when they start talking about the psychological effect of being exposed to violence as opposed to sex, perhaps the weakest argument in the film. Personally, I think you need to be a little disturbed in the first place to be affected adversely by sex or violence in any form of media, but if you go with the argument in this film, sex is seen as acceptable and violence abhorrent and damaging. It’s just the exact opposite of the MPAA’s supposed agenda. How is that any better?. We also get some amusing discussion from shock indie filmmaker Waters about how the MPAA slapped his underrated “A Dirty Shame” with the box-office killing NC-17 rating. That rating still stigmatised by many ignoramuses in the general public as a replacement X-rating- i.e. porno- even though that’s precisely what they were trying to get away from with the new rating. The aim was simply to have a classification for cinematic offerings of an adult nature that were not pornographic in nature nor intent for sexual content and crude humour. Waters’ film is descriptive and cheerfully offensive, yes, but we don’t see a whole lot of sex or nudity in that film. He argues that because a lot of the sex acts described in the film are so bizarre that the MPAA slapped an NC-17 on it because they didn’t understand it, and just assumed it was depraved!

Also funny is yet another disgruntled filmmaker (yes, the film is biased, no opposing view is adequately conveyed) Atom Egoyan, discussing why a threesome in his “Where the Truth Lies” cursed it to an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, presumably because it involved two men and one woman. The MPAA’s response? Too much thrusting! Yes, they actually have people counting these things. But they promised it wasn’t an anti-gay problem!...uh-huh...

Matt Stone of “South Park” fame is also on hand to point out that when he and Trey Parker were slapped with an NC-17 for their indie comedy “Orgazmo”, the MPAA refused to give them help on how to downgrade an NC-17 to an R or even give details of why the decision was given. But when a few years later they were making “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”, the MPAA was more than happy to give them some pointers on their findings. Yeah, that’s a fair system, isn’t it?

The most shocking finding, however, is the notion that precedent is not allowed to be used in the appeals process! How frigging useless is that? Why bother having an appeals process if you have no precedent to compare your film’s case to? It’s an absolute joke, or it would be one, were it not so tragically unfair to filmmakers.

Admittedly, Dick puts himself into the film (heh, heh) a little too frequently for my liking (shades of Michael Moore), in his own dealings with the MPAA (though some of this is very funny- albeit a little scary, too, as he battles with a truly uncooperative MPAA chairperson), and perhaps he is a little more enamoured than the audience with two goofy lesbian private dicks (did I just type that?) he gets to track down some elusive MPAA board members (whose names are supposed to be a secret, and I must confess, I thought that it was a bit of an invasion of privacy, well intended or not).

Overall, this was a story waiting to be told, and it’s definitely an entertaining and informative experience. At the very least it will have people debating just who the right people are to decide what can and cannot receive a film classification, and why. I’d love to see a follow-up from a 2017 perspective to see if things have changed or not.

Rating: B-