Sometimes I Feel, I Got To, Get Away...

Journal sielwolf's Journal: Sometimes I Feel, I Got To, Get Away... 8

Journal by sielwolf on Saturday September 23, 2006 @08:53PM

I just saw the most important movie of the year and I think everyone should go see it.

It describes a cabal of oligarchs who, in a bid to maintain their grip on institutions have set up a tribunal with no transparency. They cast down judgment with no other recourse but the same institution. They provide no material of charge to the defendant and instead hide behind a curtain of noble and pure intentions.

This movie shatters this notion and casts everything into clear perspective: that power, unchecked and unaccountable, has taken hold of this country in the last forty years. The majority suffer dumbly accepting these declarations as part of some moral reasoning that now is obviously all smoke and mirrors.

I rarely get political. I hate politics. But I think this movie is important. How else are we going to realize to treat the highest institutions in our country with the healthy skepticism that every American should have? See this movie.

Of course I'm talking about the MPAA, how they rate movies and the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

******
[Now forget what I just wrote. We'll come back to it later]

Nothing is important. No thing you can say, do, or describe has any shining imperial magnitude so that everyone and everything will bend to it. Importance is something that is only useful to historians. And it is just a convenient label to abridge history, or explain why certain things persist while so many other moments and people draw out of memory like water back into the sea. Of course what is 'important' in history is even up to debate. And I guess it makes sense because how else would history academics continue to provide for themselves if there wasn't an endless circle jerk of arguments and books and journals and conferences?

I've been critical of criticism a lot recently, none more so than the idea that it is possible to extract the absolute place of a moment at the very instant it is unraveling. We are all bored. So we play this game. Our little lives are filled with what we think is smart discussion. It doesn't matter. But most of us are smart enough to see how trivial our lives are. Sadly, the critics like to draw it all out again. Nothing like being the first to make the big pronouncement. First on Everest; 14th man at the Last Supper.

I'm tired of talking, thinking and (most of all) reading Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com but his review of This Film is Not Yet Rated has all the implicit crap that makes all criticism the sort of incestuous molecule that has fucked itself into invisibility.

He brazenly declares that only people interested in the "movie business or censorship" would be interested in this movie. He then goes on to complain that the basic structure of the movie defeats catering to this audience.

Implied is the conceit that no one else gives a shit about how a movie is rated. Uh, no? Not even just a little bit? Everybody sees trailers. And everybody's seen movies that they say either "Whoa, how the hell is this PG?" or "Why is this R again?" Sure, you get the "This movie contains strong language, partial nudity and Frenchmen talking, talking and talking" but that really doesn't help a lot of folks. At one time or another most people are curious about it. And if you start talking about it, there will always be one movie that they remember triggering their curiosity.

Take Red Dawn, the first PG-13 movie. Well that movie's pretty damn brutal. Like Commando brutal. Schoolteacher shot dead in front of the school, mass executions, swearing, man getting killed by grenade, man getting killed by bow and arrow, execution of a friend turned traitor. Now if you watch This Film is Not Yet Rated you find out that PG-13 allows for very brief non-sexual nudity, and strong violence that is non-graphic. That basically means you can shoot people and blow stuff up as long as you don't show blood, burnt or mangled corpses.

But wait... Red Dawn had blood and corpses... huh?

After This Film is Not Yet Rated that all makes sense. Basically there are no guidelines or reference points given to raters. They use their own judgment. So they could up and decide Finding Nemo's a PG-13 movie. Also since the raters are not screened for any sort of credential nor are their rulings made public, the whole system is unaccountable. And not only does the ratings board then show consistent inconsistencies and biases they also provide more constructive feedback to studio movies than independent ones in terms of what it would take to trim a cut from one rating to another.

All of this unfolds during the movie as the filmmaker not only interviews other filmmakers and their experiences being rated at the same time as he hires a private investigator to uncover just what sort of people the MPAA anoints to judge what movies you can and can't see (remember, any movie rated NC-17 cannot be advertised for on television, shown edited on television [as the edits must be from at least an R or less film] or sold at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster).

Of course Emerson finds the whole investigation ridiculous. Why not just tell us the results, he whines? He wants more history, more background. Basically more of the stuff that most people find insufferably boring. Who gives a shit what censorship happened to Singin' in the Rain outside of historians and musical fans? Maybe you could sprinkle in some cool factoid like how Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch basically killed the old movie code and when it was put up for rating in 1994 (over twenty years after its original release) it got an NC-17. How fucking badass is that?

No, Emerson wants a chin-stroking documentary about the long dry history of film censorship.

Someone should have told him that wasn't the movie he was watching.

Because he spends his whole review bitching about the movie This Film is Not Yet Rated isn't, than the one that it is. If he had been observing instead of just looking he would have seen that the whole investigation part of the movie did the time honored thing of Showing Rather than Telling: how much of a supervillain impenetrable fortress the MPAA made, how paranoid they where about leaks of any information, how a few faceless cronies basically run the place and impose their will on what a rating is, how scared people in Hollywood are to piss the MPAA off as it would mean being banished from 99% of the theater and DVD market, how any review is done in a style that seemed more at place in The Prisoner and how, in the end, the final judges of a movie (those who make up the final appeals board) are all executives at the major studios and theater chains... and either an Episcopalian or Catholic official. All of this unfolds organically. It is spread out in a digestible fashion that gives you a real sense how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Did Emerson stop watching the screen or something? Could he not see over the chair in front of him with his nose stuffed into his own taint?

Shit... and this is the same sort of dorky self-absorption that kills the mainstreams interest in any movie described as "great" or "important". Welcome to the age of marketing and a critic is just another marketer. He's trying to sell you a way of life. To agree with them 100% is to place you right at center of their community (be it the NYU film school, Cahier du Cinema, or RuthlessReviews.com).

Of course we are the generation of advertising overload. We don't hear any more. We don't look. All we see are a towering wall of flashing neon and we are blind to it. It doesn't effect us.

So a critic calling down rulings like Moses at Sinai goes over like... well a fucking critic (see all previous mentions of 99% of the population not giving a shit). Stupid critics (see Jim Emerson) just chalk it up to the mainstream not caring. That those who are most receptive where those who where the original audience is a complete false positive. Wow... people most like film critics like film criticism (next thing he's going to tell us is that the sky's blue and water's wet). But that's like being a vegetarian and then marrying into a kosher family. A nice but inert gesture.

All of this is classically illustrated by Bill Simmons (the ESPN Sports Guy) discovering HBO's The Wire. Simmons is a consumer of pop culture. He just as willing to write 3000 words on Miami Vice or Karate Kid as he is to break down the NBA at the All-Star break. That's why folks read him. Now he's a big fan of the Michael Mann crime dramas, The Sopranos and The Godfather... and for the longest time he resisted The Wire.

Why? Because folks attacked him with the "Greatest!...Important!" angle. Like he said here it made him even more stubborn:

Readers kept telling me to watch this show. They implored me. They kept e-mailing me. They badgered me. I didn't listen. As I've described multiple times in this space, I hate being told that I should watch a show; I like discovering them at my own speed. And if it made me three or four years late for the party with classics like "The Sopranos" and "24," so be it. It's just that I can't willingly jump onto a show; it needs to happen organically.
For instance, here's what happened with "The Wire:" On a Tuesday night in mid-August, the Sports Gal and I were home with nothing to watch and ending up stumbling onto "The Wire Re-Up" button on HBO On Demand. I'd been avoiding this show for four years because the Baltimore drug scene didn't appeal to me unless Raffie Palmeiro and Miggy Tejada were involved. But the Sports Gal was the one who said, "Let's watch the first show of 'The Wire' and see if we like it."
Within 10 minutes, we were hooked. We ended up banging out three episodes the first night and another three the second night. Then our cable system switched to a new provider ... and all the Season 1 episodes disappeared into thin air. Now we were scrambling. None of the video stores around us had Season 1 in stock. I ended up ordering Season 1 online (two-day delivery courtesy of Amazon Prime), but we were so hooked on the show that when someone returned Season 1 to our video store, we rented the last three discs that same night. We banged out the last seven episodes in two nights before the DVD was even delivered. That's how hooked we were.
I'll go this far: I'd put Season 1 of "The Wire" against anything. The first three seasons of "The Sopranos." Seasons 1 or 2 of "24." The first seasons of "NYPD Blue," "ER" or "Miami Vice." You name it. I have never seen a show like it. Season 2 wasn't as good (if Season 1 was an A-plus-plus-plus, then Season 2 was a B-plus), and we're just about to dive into Season 3, so I don't have an opinion on that yet. Everyone seems to agree that they outdid themselves with Season 4 and that it's a legitimate masterpiece. Just know that you can absolutely start watching Season 4 without having seen the other three seasons. It's not an ideal way to break into the show, but you can do it.

He ends the article with the money quote:

Anyway, I can't believe I didn't watch this show sooner. It enrages me. I'm not doing the "YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS SHOW OR YOUR WHOLE LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE!" routine, because that might scare you away. Just know that it's one of the five greatest shows I've ever seen. And I hope you stumble across it some day.
Organically, of course.

Any marketer would tell you that "organically" is just code for the soft sell. With our hypercompetitive media market, branding is more important than ever and the reason for that is the soft sell. Folks want to feel that they are master of their own choices (even if it's just the convenience of a moment or the subtle effect of watching too many ads). They want a brand to carry as a totem and identify with. People do that with the cars they buy, the clothes they wear, the people they hang out with... and the movies they watch.

Earlier this week Bill Simmons reviewed the hackneyed sports drama The Gridiron Gang . Blah blah blah... Average movie that hits all the right buttons... Hollywood just craps them out now...

Then out of no where he mentions The Wire. He goes deep into the show... looks at how it got picked up for a fifth season even though it's been a consistent weak performer. He becomes introspective on how a show like The Wire, one that has great characters, humor, depth and personality... a show that treats you like an adult... a show that for all of the hard realism to it has an unbreakable faith in humanity, could be so under-watched while folks go gay over the Sopranos and run out to watch the Rock solve all the world's problems in two hours.

Reading that I was struck how profoundly the show had seemingly hit him. In his first post he talks about the show casually. He made glib remarks (Stringer Bell doesn't look a thing like Alonzo Mourning BTW) and kind of pumps up the characters while playing his "organic" angle.

But just a week later the show seems to have touched him at a much more profound level. That a guy who consumes so much disposable shit culture, there was finally something that actually was an awkward slice of perfection. He seemed to be coming to terms with it.

And it's not like The Wire is going to save souls, turn water up from the dry cracked Sahara ground or anything. But for many people who see it, they come out changed. Through this show they pierce the haze and see a single thing clearly, for the first time.

That's what Emerson really missed about This Film is Not Yet Rated. It is an easy film. It isn't comprehensive. Many of its jokes don't work and it isn't going to make anyone a better person. But what would happen if, I dunno, 50 million Americans saw it? What if teenagers across the country understood what a PG-13 mindless action movie meant the MPAA thought about them? That they are irreparably ill-equipped to deal with eroticism but perfect vessels for endless pointless violence?

Gee, at a basic level, maybe the MPAA might get off of its ass and develop an 'A/Adult' rating to sit between 'R' and 'NC-17', a place for all the films that deal with sex and alternative lifestyles and the little movies that most people would be fine never seeing but happy to know they are there if they want them? The 'A' rating that Ebert has been championing for two decades?

Maybe if enough people saw This Film is Not Yet Rated real and lasting change would come to the media industry? Would historians look back and say that, maybe, this film was "Important"?

Heh. Dick.

*****

So, we've reached the end of the post. Now go back to the top and read the first bit from the start to the '*****'. Now which do you find more effective? That or all the stuff that came after it? The hard or the soft sell?

You think for a moment and then say, "More effective? I guess it depends on what you where selling. Maybe you're trying to get everyone to go see This Film is Not Yet Rated." You pause here, "But rereading it... actually, that might not be it at all. Maybe that's just a cover and your whole sell was something completely different."

Ahh, you always where a smart one, you.

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