Review of This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) by Riren — 25 Feb 2007

This movie raises some great questions about our movie rating system and the needlessly shadowy MPAA organization. However, it has some problems of its own. George Carlin discusses our societal problem with enjoying fictional violence and prohibiting fictional sex in his stand-up comedy with greater depth and maturity than a dozen of these directors and producers do in actually discussing it for the film.

Almost the entire first half of the movie is devoted to a parade of writers, directors and producers complaining about getting a gratuitous rating for showing a sexual act or semi-erotic behavior - This Film Is Not Yet Rated gets redundant quickly for far too long on this matter.

They save the really compelling problems for use in small doses, such as Gunner Palace's R-rating; it was a documentary about what real soldiers are doing in Iraq, that got an R for drug use and profane language.

It is much easier to sympathize with a director who is just trying to show the American public how their soldiers work and relax than it is with a director who complains that she wasn't able to show a graphic threeway in her comedy, or that he was chastised for having a girl pick up a bottle with her labia.

Several of the things the documentary defends are juvenile, and it's kind of funny to see the film makers be so defensive about it. The Pentagon's possible censorship of war movies gets perhaps 60 seconds in this 95-minute movie.

Movie "piracy" gets maybe 90 seconds. The cliche of violence against women gets a semi-humorous musical montage. Yet there's plenty of time to watch the lesbian private investigator talk about her life, sit in the car on camera on stakeouts and play phone tag - this is time that should have been invested in a meaningful discussion of issues raised in the film.

The film's biggest problem is the MPAA, the organization that creates and gives ratings. The MPAA is too secretive to have contributed much in the way of interviews, and so it is blasted and jabbed at Michael Moore style.

Certainly after the movie they seem to have deserved this treatment, but a thinking viewer can't help but be disappointed that most of what we hear about the MPAA is speculation as to their activities and motives.

The most clever part of the movie documents its own submission to the MPAA for a rating, though much like the rest of the film, this part is more entertaining than informative - voices are "re-enacted" to give antagonistic tones, cartoon faces are used to characterize board members, conversations are cut making the director look sympathetic, and so on.

Still, for the information the film provides and all the questions it raises, it's absolutely worth seeing. You may even want to make a checklist of all the topics you'll have to discuss afterwards.

It definitely provides more of those than your average movie, or even your average documentary.