Saturday, May 26, 2007

This film is not yet rated

Worth watching just for the deleted snippets of puppet sex from Team America. Matt Stone explains that he and Trey Parker had cunningly bulked up the bedroom scene with eye-popping a la carte activities such as water sports and coprophilia in order to give the MPAA raters something to get their teeth into and thus ensure that the bulk of it survived the attentions of this anonymous committee of professional prigs.

Kirby Dick's investigation of the secretive ratings board is so good natured and humorous, that you hardly pause to reflect on some of the sinister tactics he brings to bear on the case, like employing a lesbian PI and her daughter to rummage through the rubbish and personal lives of the serving raters that they systematically unmask.

I found it all a touch too insular to really stoke up my sense of outrage. "I'm going to say the F word," says interviewee Bingham Ray, "I believe this is a fascist system." Well yes, it is vaguely disturbing that there's a Catholic priest and a Pentacostal minister on the appeals board, but Iran it isn't. The very worse thing that can happen to controversial directors is denial of access to markets, rather than say, burning at the stake or public stoning.

Another of Dick's interviewees tellingly concludes that formal government censorship might be preferable to the MPAA system simply because it would be inherently more accountable.

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