What a bizarre, backwards, prudish country we live in.
A video game that encourages violence and bloody murder is fine, but introduce a sex scene and parents go ballistic. The same thing happens with film:
An explicit sex scene involving two men and a woman in Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s latest movie is expected to earn the film a prohibitive rating in the U.S. that, if sustained, will “severely limit” its box office there, Mr. Egoyan predicted yesterday.
The Classification and Ratings Administration of the powerful Motion Picture Association of America plans to reveal its official rating of Mr. Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies no later than tomorrow. But given what Mr. Egoyan calls “the very conservative climate in America,” he and the film’s North American distributor, Toronto-based ThinkFilm Inc., “strongly suspect” it will be rated NC-17. This means no one 17 years of age or under in the U.S. will be allowed admission, even if accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.
While Where the Truth Lies has some tough violence, nudity, lesbian encounters and drug-taking, it is a sex scene involving stars Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon and the film’s female lead, 29-year-old Rachel Blanchard, that seems to be giving U.S. adjudicators trouble — something U.S. observers told Mr. Egoyan he might expect after the movie’s world premiere in May at the Cannes film festival.
“I guess I’m naive; I really had no idea it would be a problem,” the director said at that time.
Now, here’s a question: are film ratings some kind of law, or are they just industry self-regulation? I mean, it’s like TV ratings — no one is going to bust into your house and arrest you (yet) if you let your kids watch a TV-M program.
Here’s what I’d love to do: own my own movie theatre, and screw those stupid censors. If a film was filled with violent images, I wouldn’t let any kids in under, say, 40. And if there was sex, well, assuming it was consensual and loving, what’s wrong with that?
