This Film Is Not Yet Rated (***1/4)

 ? Ever wonder about how movies get rated? This documentary looks at the process from start to finish. Filmmaker Kirby Dick submitted his own film and even hired a private detective to learn about the somewhat secret process employed by the Motion Picture Association of America. In addition to decrying this secrecy, Dick makes several specific criticisms of the MPAA ratings. He argues that, when deciding between an R rating and the box-office-poison NC-17 (or an R and a PG-13), independent films are treated more harshly than studio films, gay sex more harshly than straight sex, female sexuality more harshly than male sexuality, and sexual content more harshly than violence. Film clips and interviews help make these points. The interviewees include directors such as John Waters, Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry), and Trey Parker (South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut).

+ The movie pretty easily proves its points. Parker, for example, notes that the MPAA refused to tell him how to cut his independent film Orgazmo to avoid an NC-17 rating, but was willing to do so for the studio-made South Park. Even more interesting is the look at sexuality on film. Implicitly, the subject is not only the ratings system, but morality. Why are more films rated NC-17 for sexual content than violence? Even as American movies have become more violent over the last few decades, serious depictions of sexuality have probably decreased (even as comic portrayals, such as in the American Pie movies, proliferate).

- The significant portion of the movie devoted to the detective and her attempts to learn the identity of the MPAA ratings board members is not uninteresting, yet adds little to the arguments made in the rest of the movie. Some of that time might be better spent looking at the one element it somewhat neglects: the audience. For all I sympathized with Dick and the filmmakers he interviewed, I couldn’t help but continue to think that, for the most part, the rating system does reflect the values and beliefs of a majority of the public. The point is implicitly acknowledged a couple of times in the movie. It’s never made sense to me that parents would worry more about nudity and sexuality than violence, but it seems that they do. And is anyone surprised that gay sex would be seen as more objectionable than straight sex?

= ***1/4 Recommended not only for anyone interested cinema as art, or in censorship issues, but for people interested in the ways society projects its values.

IMDB link

viewed at PFS screening

Why We Fight (**3/4)

 A partly successful attempt to document the growth of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower warned of in his 1961 farewell address.

Documentary filmmaker and college professor Eugene Jarecki calls himself an Eisenhower Republican. His new movie takes its name and subject from Frank Capra’s series of World War II propaganda films, but its inspiration from Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell speech. Despite having leveraged his war-hero status into a two-term presidency, Eisenhower warned of the danger of what he termed the military-industrial complex. Jarecki has assembled a wide variety of voices, experts like Senator John McCain and ordinary folks like a retired New York cop (whose son perished on 9/11) and a young army recruit. These voices, also including Eisenhower’s son and granddaughter, are worth hearing, and Jarecki doesn’t limit his experts to leftist types, or even to those who you’d expect to agree with him. (Bill Kristol and Richard Perle are among the hawkish.) The movie’s a little haphazard in its structure, but suggests that politicians, corporations, and employees alike amount to different cogs in the giant wheel of the MIC, a wheel propelled by inertia as well as the economic interests of those players. Though he conceived his film before the Iraq war, that becomes his case study.

Jarecki isn’t a rabble-rouser like Michael Moore; though not admiring of the current administration, he sees the president (and not just the current one) as another cog. Both Democrats and Republicans have ignored Eisenhower’s warning; the USA outspends the next dozen nations combined on its military. The jobs provided by building unnecessary weapons systems become the justification for them, and few in Congress will challenge them at a financial cost to their constituents. I kind of already believed this, yet I still wasn’t entirely sold by Jarecki. There was a lot of explanation, and if the idea of the MIC is new to you, this isn’t a bad place to learn. But I think the film’s primary audience will be those already familiar with the idea, and I was looking for specifics as well as talking heads. For example, the film only gives one dollar figure to illustrate the above point about weapons systems bringing money to an individual congressional district, though we’re told generally that military dollars flow very widely. The cop’s changing outlook is interesting, but it’s only an illustration, only one guy. Finally, the intense media coverage of the Iraq War makes some of Jarecki’s movie (like the details about Vice President Dick Cheney’s ties to Halliburton) redundant, even if he’s trying to make a larger point.

IMDb link