Recent viewings:

This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006). Independent filmmaker Kirby Dick sets out to investigate, expose and criticize the secretive MPAA review board which assigns ratings to movies.

There's much hilarity and puzzlement at the discrepancies between the ratings given out to various movies. Dick particularly attacks the MPAA board for two perceived failings: considering sex more offensive than extreme violence, and judging homosexual content much more harshly than similarly-explicit heterosexual content. He also criticizes the vague rationales for the ratings given, and the way that the MPAA gives more useful feedback to major studios seeking ratings than to independent filmmakers.

Along the way, Dick hires a private investigator to track down the members of the secretive board. This does have the effect of demonstrating that most of the members are not parents of teenaged children, as various statements of the chairperson of the board is quoted as saying. But this, and the subsequent revelation that the appeals board is made up of head honchos from major studios and a couple of clergymen, seem less significant than the demonstrated inequities that he's already portrayed.

One of the reasons for all this furor is that the dreaded NC-17 rating is a significant barrier to wide distribution. As one filmmaker comments, if your film receives an NC-17, the studio may back out of distribution and promotion deals, many theater chains will categorically refuse to show the film, and rental chains like Blockbuster will resist carrying the film.

This Film is Not Yet Rated does not address the degree to which internet and mail-order distribution of movies has created an alternative channel to old-style movie theaters. Nor, aside from a brief early discussion of early censorship codes such as the Hays Code, does it discuss at any length the likelihood that, in the absence of something like the MPAA board, the government -- or worse yet, fifty state governments and thousands of busybody local governments -- would have taken it as an invitation to take up regulating film content themselves.

It's a very entertaining documentary, which effectively points out shortcomings and ironies about the existing movie-rating system, but did not convince me that it offered any viable alternative.

In what can only be described as a gesture of defiance, Dick documents how, after secretly identifying the members of the MPAA review board and criticizing them on film, he sent a copy of the film to that very same board for review and rating. Considering that the movie opens with a gleeful smorgasbord of sexually-oriented clips to which the Board had objected, and contains illustrative clips of other "objectionable" material throughout, as well as identifying, picturing, and in some cases criticizing the individual members of the board, the NC-17 rating that resulted was no surprise. But, as Dick describes in a Q&A session included with the DVD extra features, the Board rescinded that rating after he added more material, presumably the material discussing the board's rating and the discussions with the MPAA.