Celluloid Heroes

This the final part of a three-part commentary on the U.S. movie rating system. Part I was PG-13 Is The Spawn of Satan. Part II was Mature Adults Need Not Apply.

Do It By The Numbers

The single biggest flaw in our current movie rating system is that shoehorns vastly different levels of content into the same rating. The R rating can cover everything from the gentle Lost in Translation, with one brief scene in a strip club to a Friday the 13th movie in which a half-dozen nude women get decapitated or meet some other graphically depicted and gruesome fate.

The MPAA has tried to help recently by publishing a brief summary of their reasons for applying a rating, but these are often ambiguous at best. What exactly is a “Sexual Situation”? How much violence is “Strong” violence?

So what do I propose? Nothing less than taking G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17 and tossing them on a bonfire. We can do better. (more…)

Can somebody tell me what kind of a world we live in, where a man dressed up as a bat gets all of my press? This town needs an enema!

In the late 1980s, Batman was enjoying quite a renaissance, mostly on the strength of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, along with Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke which rescued the character from the campy 1960s television show and returned him to the dark, gritty streets from which he came. When it was announced that Warner Brothers was producing a motion picture version, the comic’s legions of fans could scarcely contain themselves. The film attracted A-List talent, most notably Jack Nicholson as the Joker and was Warner’s big film of 1989.

What the fans got, however, was a bit of a mixed bag. (more…)

Best thing for him, really. His therapy was going nowhere.

Silence of the Lambs was a rule breaker from the start. Contrary to convention, its primary relationship is between its diminutive female heroine and an urbane serial killer. It cleaned up at the Academy Awards despite being essentially a highbrow horror film that was released in mid-February, approximately eight months before the start of “Oscar season.” Moreover, Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor despite being on screen for about 16 minutes.

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Are you classified as human?

Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

The Fifth Element is a big, noisy, goofy piece of cotton candy, and I mean that as compliment. This is not a film that tries to be anything more than what it is and it’s a lot of fun. Director Luc Besson has put his own adolescent daydreams up on the screen and surrounded them with a dense, richly imagined universe.

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It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.

I think the last “traditional” western that Clint Eastwood starred in was the television show Rawhide. Even his own The Outlaw Josey Wales, while as close as he has come to what people normally think of as a western, had enough of Eastwood’s character-based humor to make it stand apart from the crowd.

Unforgiven is not going to change that, either. Eastwood’s first Best Picture winner is less of a Western than a clear-eyed rumination on the subject of violence. Some have labeled the film “anti-violence” but that is an over-simplification that denies the film’s depth.

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This is part two of a three-part commentary on the movie rating system. Part one was “PG-13 Is The Spawn of Satan.”

Mature Adults Need Not Apply

In most circles of life, the words “mature” and “adult” are seen as compliments, signs that you are handling yourself in a manner superior to toddlers and teenagers. No one that I know of wants to be thought of otherwise.

So why is it when the words “mature” and/or “adult” are applied to movies, suddenly everyone tightens their sphincter like a Victorian spinster? Calling a movie mature or adult never seems to refer to non-juvenile matter like Mystic River or Million Dollar Baby, but rather to Behind the Green Door or Ass Rammers 12. When did maturity become synonomous with plain brown wrappers?

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