This Film Is Not Yet Rated
Directed by Kirby Dick
No one involved with This Film Is Not Yet Rated thinks intelligently. Director Kirby Dick challenges the practice of the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board with angry, anti-Bush fervor (including thinly veiled administration attacks). But Dick’s methods are alarmingly unscrupulous. He rounds-up liberal think-alikes—filmmakers, indie producers and ACLU shills—for on-screen interviews. They scream “censorship!” at the simple bureaucratic function of film industry self-protection. And then Dick plunges ahead using illiberal tactics to demean the ratings system.
Determined to infiltrate the secretive ratings board, Dick hires private detectives to stalk MPAA employees and sneak surveillance of their non-office activities. (He even reveals their car license plate numbers.) That this appalling invasion of privacy has not been mentioned in any of the film’s laudatory reviews proves that the contemporary documentary also requires viewers who don’t think intelligently.
Dick jumps on the freedom-of-speech bandwagon without providing a reliable ratings board history. The fact that MPAA president Jack Valenti instituted the ratings system in the late ’60s to help the film industry keep pace with changing cultural mores is never mentioned in Dick’s ad hominem attack on Valenti. (This is the Left’s lingering Vietnam resentment; vilifying Valenti because he was a member of LBJ’s administration.) But the fact is, Valenti’s ratings system prevented dangerous government interference in filmmaking; it keeps the process apolitical. (One of Dick’s interviewees actually requests federal intervention!)
Dick and friends ignore the inconvenient truth that the ratings system is not a single man’s fiat, but is approved, sponsored and paid for by the major studios. Griping from indie filmmakers Kimberly Peirce, Mary Harron, Darren Aronofsky, distributor Bingham Ray and others is disingenuous. Ignoring their own participation in that system conveniently promotes the fantasy of indie fearlessness. These ingrates don’t dare become true independents and make movies outside the Hollywood factory. And Dick’s backstory never acknowledges Melvin Van Peebles boldly releasing Sweet Sweetback in 1971 without an MPAA rating—a heroic example that should shame these First Amendment crybabies.
This Film’s typical complaint that an NC-17 rating limits a movie’s marketability is horsehockey. All major media accept ads for NC-17 movies—especially the alternative press (the real market for indie films). Dick’s friends grouse about losing money, not about how much freedom of expression studio heads deem permissible. But Dick doesn’t ask his buddies if their movies and themes are suitable for children. He lazily harps on the old sex vs. violence bias, never consulting filmmakers who desire the freedom to depict violence. (Instead, Peckinpah’s masterpiece Straw Dogs is disgracefully intercut with junk.)
The contemporary documentary was ruined when Michael Moore encouraged the abrogation of credibility in favor of sarcasm. This also becomes Dick’s mode when using cartoon reenactments to depict audio interviews with ratings board chairman Joan Graves. Such loose cannon visual rhetoric dooms the Liberal documentary. Dick even draws inappropriate links to Columbine and the Iraq war out of an excess of self-righteousness. Kirby Dick evades Hollywood’s real political-economy by using Lefty persiflage; he thinks with his little head.
anonymous
