The film has a very good premise; to infiltrate the inner chamber of the MPAA and expose who's rating our films. A team of private investigators is hired to track down who's responsible for evaluating films, but we soon find out it's not as simple as calling them on the phone.
There's wonderful interviews with a ton of directors such as John Waters and Kevin Smith who have been urged to cut their films because of the content. Getting an NC-17 rating is a financial death sentence because most big, chain stores such as Walmart and Blockbuster will refuse to carry your film if it has that rating. This doesn't mean that a film-maker needs to cut down a film to get it released, just that it won't make as much money and needs to be independently financed.
I can see the film being quite titillating for someone who doesn't want to bother with the plot of a film and just cut to the sex. There are some very astute points that are made, but I don't feel that This Film Is Not Yet Rated delved deep enough for me or showed enough history. I wanted to learn more about the social history of attaching ratings such as pre-code films, PMRC (the counsel that believes popular music causes rape, violence and other destructive behavior) or other rating systems that border on censorship.
There's some interesting juxtapositions of sex scenes that look exactly the same (such as comparing American Pie to But I'm a Cheerleader), but got different ratings to show the arbitrariness of the the evaluation process, but after the 200th pelvic thrust, I got the message. There's quite a montage of sexual content in the film. I wanted to see more about the investigation. After watching the same (and I mean the same) clip from a film for the fourth time, I felt like I was watching documentary on the longest orgasms in film instead of a documentary about the rating system.
I hope to see this subject approached in another film in the future. It's a very important topic. I remember the days before PMRC and listening to bands like Suicidal Tendencies when I was a teenager. I'm still alive today with no rapes or suicide attempts.
Another film you might want to see if you're interested in censorship is Cinema Paradiso. It's not a documentary, but its about a movie theater where a priest cuts up films before his town can view them. You may also want to see Red-Headed Woman, a pre-code film about a woman seducing a married man.
There's wonderful interviews with a ton of directors such as John Waters and Kevin Smith who have been urged to cut their films because of the content. Getting an NC-17 rating is a financial death sentence because most big, chain stores such as Walmart and Blockbuster will refuse to carry your film if it has that rating. This doesn't mean that a film-maker needs to cut down a film to get it released, just that it won't make as much money and needs to be independently financed.
I can see the film being quite titillating for someone who doesn't want to bother with the plot of a film and just cut to the sex. There are some very astute points that are made, but I don't feel that This Film Is Not Yet Rated delved deep enough for me or showed enough history. I wanted to learn more about the social history of attaching ratings such as pre-code films, PMRC (the counsel that believes popular music causes rape, violence and other destructive behavior) or other rating systems that border on censorship.
There's some interesting juxtapositions of sex scenes that look exactly the same (such as comparing American Pie to But I'm a Cheerleader), but got different ratings to show the arbitrariness of the the evaluation process, but after the 200th pelvic thrust, I got the message. There's quite a montage of sexual content in the film. I wanted to see more about the investigation. After watching the same (and I mean the same) clip from a film for the fourth time, I felt like I was watching documentary on the longest orgasms in film instead of a documentary about the rating system.
I hope to see this subject approached in another film in the future. It's a very important topic. I remember the days before PMRC and listening to bands like Suicidal Tendencies when I was a teenager. I'm still alive today with no rapes or suicide attempts.
Another film you might want to see if you're interested in censorship is Cinema Paradiso. It's not a documentary, but its about a movie theater where a priest cuts up films before his town can view them. You may also want to see Red-Headed Woman, a pre-code film about a woman seducing a married man.