this film is not yet rated

Anne and I recently watched This Film is Not Yet Rated, a documentary about how the MPAA assigns its ratings to films.

It's very well-made and well-paced, and while it's bound to piss off artists, filmmakers, and anyone who wants power to be accountable, it's still really funny and entertaining.

Director Kriby Dick observed, like many of us have, that there seems to be a very arbitrary metric applied to assigning ratings for films. For example, an incredibly violent film like The Passion of the Christ was given an R, while a film with sexual content like Exotica was given an NC-17. There's an inconsistent standard applied to sexual content, too: Boys Don't Cry, which featured two women a woman and a Transgender man* making love, was originally given NC-17, while American Pie, which featured a teenage boy masturbating with an apple pie, was given an R.

Kirby Dick went on a mission to understand how the ratings and chosen, and who makes those choices. Through interviews with filmmakers like John Waters, Kevin Smith, and Kimberly Peirce, we learn how truly arbitrary and unreasonable the ratings board is, and through the efforts of a private investigator, we learn how dishonest the MPAA is about who these anonymous and unaccountable raters are (for example, they claim that their raters serve for a short time, and have young children, when many of them have actually served for years and have children in their 20s.) It becomes clear over the film's 90 minutes that there really is no objective standard for rating films, and because the film raters are accountable to nobody, there's no real incentive for them to have one.

It's incredible how much power this small group of people have over how films are rated, and how willing the film industry is to submit to their censorship. The double-standard applied to mainstream studios versus independents wasn't surprising, but was no less disturbing to me. Many contracts these days require filmmakers to significantly alter their films to earn an R rating if originally given NC-17, or a PG-13 rating if originally given an R. (Films that have an NC-17 rating are nearly impossible to market: they can't be advertised on TV or in newspapers, and many big theater chains won't carry them; try to square that logic with all the commercials you see for the UNRATED! UNCUT! versions of teen sex comedies and Girls Gone Wild videos you see advertised on television every night.) The film shows side-by-side comparisons of the NC-17 and R versions of some scenes, so viewers can draw their own conclusions about the differences and decide if they agree with the MPAA or not. (I, uh, disagree, and will now go to Charles Nelson Riley for the win.)

The DVD version of the film includes deleted scenes, including a fantastic interview with EFF's Fred von Lohmann on how the MPAA works very hard to cripple new technology with things like the DMCA. It's something that I wish would be made freely-available by the filmmakers, so more people could get a better understanding of how copyright and fair use is supposed to work, and how hard the *AA orgs are working to undermine the public interest in the pursuit of even greater profits.

I'm a parent, and I appreciate knowing what to expect from films before I send my kids off to watch them, but it's clear to me after watching this film that the MPAA ratings system is severely broken, and needs to be fixed.

I give it 4.5 out of 5, and the official WWdN Happy Monkey of Goodness Seal of Approval.