Admittedly, I haven’t seen Kelly Reichart’s Wendy and Lucy since Cannes. But I’m still going to stand by the contention that it seems just a little weird for a film about a girl and her dog–nudity-free, with some moments of tension but very little violence as I recall–-to receive an R rating (for “language”), while Richard Kelly’s horror film The Box, said to contain “some violence and disturbing images,” gets a PG-13.

This is probably not worth getting upset about. I’m not even sure if cutting off a teenage audience will really hurt Lucy’s theatrical success––Michelle Williams’ adolescent fan base has had a good five years to come of age since Dawson’s Creek, although one does imagine that there are a lot of teenage girls following the actresses seemingly unwanted appearances in the tabloids. But at least, it’s testament to that old chestnut about how Hollywood productions have an unfair edge over indies in the ratings game. If anything, Kelly was probably contractually obligated to deliver a PG-13 and engineered his cut of The Box to comply, while Kelly Reichart, who made Wendy and Lucy without a distributor on board, simply made the film she wanted to make. Too bad she had to put so many swear words in it.

• In yet another sign that 2008 is the new 1928, Hollywood, impressed by the massive first-weekend success of High School Musical 3, is rushing a number of music-based projects into production. Paramount is bumping their Zac Efron-starring, Kenny Ortega-directed remake of Footloose up the calendar; Nick and Norah director Peter Sollett has been asked to punch up the script before a spring shoot. Meanwhile, Fox is setting up their own big-screen musical around a passel of Disney Channel stars: this time, it’s the Jonas Brothers, and the project is the first film in a hoped-for franchise based on the “Walter the Farting Dog” books. Yes, there are apparently childrens books about farting dogs. Maybe it’s not The Great Depression 2 — maybe it’s Idiocracy 0.5.
• Perhaps surprisingly, Dan Glickman says that although “there’s no fundamental difference between Obama or McCain on intellectual property issues,” an Obama administration might be slightly more favorable for the MPAA’s fight against piracy, as Obama be expected to connect to “newer, younger White House staffers and appointees about the value and importance of IP.” But the studios’ lobbying board would clash sharply with a Democrat administration over net neutrality, which Obama strongly supports, and Glickman … doesn’t.
• DETAILS Magazine has invited their readers to submit film pitches. In partnership with Larry Meistrich of Shooting Gallery and Film Movement, the mag will seek a winning idea targeted at “intelligent, modern, metropolitan men,” they’ll then actually produce.

I was planning to weigh in on this week’s big digital rights story, the MPAA’s lawsuit against Real Networks for releasing its new RealDVD movie-copying software, but that was at the top of the week. This is the Internet. Everybody said everything that’s to be said on the matter in the first two days or hours or minutes of this, um, controversy. It’s hard to work up any Real passion on the subject anyway, as nobody really likes Real Networks (onetime online audio pioneers, now junky iTunes wannabe) or the MPAA (aka the movie police). But it all seems kinda simple to me: big, ravenous companies trying to expand/protect revenue streams, dressing it up as a copyright/artists’ rights issue. Ancient stuff.

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About a week ago, a promo video started floating around for Kevin Smith’s upcoming Seth Rogen comedy, Zach and Miri Make a Porno. I didn’t write about it because, well, I have a hard time getting it up to care about new Kevin Smith movies. But I care about this! FilmDrunk alerts us to a post on Smith’s site, where the filmmaker explains that he was forced to remove the video from his production company’s movie news page because the MPAA insists on vetting all promo materials put forth by MPAA signatory companies, of which Porno’s distributor The Weinstein Company is one. An excerpt:

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Paramount may soon be under investigation by the MPAA for allegedly marketing inappropriate content to children. Specific TV ads for Iron Man and Drillbit Taylor have been highlighted by the Better Business Bureau as being targeted to kids aged 12 and under. Apparently this isn’t kosher since both movies are rated PG-13. Of course, anyone who has been to or worked at a movie theater knows, there’s no stopping kids under the age of 13 from buying tickets to such movies. But that doesn’t mean it’s suitable for PG-13-rated fare to be directly marketed to the younger audience.

Both movies have been advertised during Nickelodeon shows Zoey 101 and Drake & Josh, which are primarily viewed by preteens and other youths. Stephanie Sanchez at IESB.net, reporting on this story, adds that the MPAA should also address Paramount’s marketing of Strange Wilderness, which she saw advertised during Spongebob Squarepants and Drake & Josh while watching the programs with her kids, aged 4 and 6. Considering that comedy is Rated R, it would seem obvious that it shouldn’t be targeted to the Nick crowd, but perhaps Paramount has trouble differentiating demographics when advertising through sister media (Paramount and Nickelodeon are both owned by Viacom).

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Has the PG-13 rating become something of a teaser for R-rated content? I’ve had this suspicion for some time now, but I feel it’s confirmed with the new trailer for the Prom Night remake. The horror flick is another PG-13 redo of an R-rated movie, another example of the contrast between the marketing allowances of now and then. But wait, is it just me, or does the Prom Night trailer feature subject matter that is still inappropriate for kids aged 13 to 16 (and younger, since the rating requires no ID)? Maybe there’s none of the soft-core nudity of the original, but there’s still that idea that prom is time for getting it on in a hotel room. Sure, the idea is nothing new to most kids, but that doesn’t mean it has to be encouraged — even if a slasher film like this can be interpreted as a punishment to those sex-having teens.

Regardless, though, of whether or not this movie features anything graphically or thematically inappropriate (disclaimer: I am no puritan nor censor; I saw the original Prom Night when I was some single-digit age, and I came out just fine), the point is that it’s something of a lie to act as though kids under 17 are not going to be attracted to those graphics and themes that are being hinted at. Even if the kids don’t end up seeking out the real-deal, they’re likely to imagine their own interpretations of what falls between the lines. Plus, isn’t it possible that a movie can communicate or stimulate a falsely tame image of sex and violence by presenting tamed-down sexual and violent material?

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• On the podcast: There Will Be Blood. There will also be demented Christmas moments. Behold visual aids, for the former and for the latter.
• The MPAA found a way to unite conservatives and liberals though a single act of censorship.
• Someone else found a way to blame Disney for turning your daughter into a slut.
• There is still a trailer for The Dark Knight, but the six-minute prequel bootleg is no more.
• Will Mark Romanek’s experience with Trent Reznor impact his remake of The Wolfman?
• Your iPod has broken you.
• Why The Hobbit is going to happen.
• Has Jodie Foster made her own Joe vs. the Volcano?
• Judd Apatow: good at both viral marketing and blow-job jokes.
• If Tracy Morgan was just a little bit more delusional, we might not have to suffer First Sunday.
• Oh, and I was watching 30 Rock when I should have been working. Oops.
• 2007: The Year of the Unwanted Pregnancy.
• Mike Figgis, pornographer.
• Belle and Sebastian, the musical.
• Sweeney Todd: a review, a marketing con
• Speaking of marketing con(troversy)s, a blogger invents one about The Dark Knight.
• Frowland’s latest honor sparks consideration of what it means to be undistributed.
• Focus Features scales new frontiers of advertorial.
• Can Clooney rub some of his magic dust on Zellweger? Does that sound dirty?
• A studio’s strike hypocrisy, somehow revealed by Jackass.

Bloggy reactions are starting to float in on that whole MPAA vs. Taxi to the Dark Side thing, and although we’re sill seeing the predictable squabbling over ideology, pretty much everyone seems to be united on one thing: the poster itself is far less offensive than the MPAA’s stance on it.

AJ Schnack spoke with Taxi director Alex Gibney, who characterized the ruling as “a cover-up”:

Removing the hood is the ultimate cover-up. [The U.S.] didn’t use to do that sort of thing. Removing the hood sends the same message as the Bush administration with the CIA tapes. It’s OK to do it, it’s just not OK to show it.

Hammering home roughly the same message, The Cinetrix proposes a protest campaign:

This movie needs to be seen. These images need to be seen. Fuck, I’m willing to run the one-sheet image every day here until the decision is reversed.

Meanwhile, the boys at conservative film blog LIBERTAS think that the very idea of the film is reprehensible…which is why they’re mad at the MPAA for drawing more attention to it by giving the poster an air of snuff. In a post broken by images of the World Trade Center aflame, Dirty Harry writes:

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• The MPAA has rejected a proposed one-sheet poster for Alex Gibney’s documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The original design incorporated an image from a news photo, of a hooded detainee flanked by two soldiers. The MPAA says since they won’t allow hoods on posters for torture porn, they can’t allow similar imagery to promote a torture doc. Distributor ThinkFilm plans to appeal.
• Brad Pitt is in talks to replace Heath Ledger, who was previously cast opposite Sean Penn, in Terrence Malick’s upcoming drama, Tree of Life. There are still few details to report about the project itself, although I guess we can reasonably deduce that whatever character Ledger was going to play has suddenly become about 14 years older.
• Midwestern exhibition chain Marcus Theaters has declined to book Sweeney Todd on any of its 49 screens, on the grounds that Paramount is asking for too much money for the prints. This seems like a late-game decision, considering the film is scheduled to open semi-wide on Friday, but Paramount says the release will be unaffected.
• Nancy Buirski is stepping down from her role as head of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, in order to create and manage “a fund to incubate and produce independent docus and fiction films.”

• While Tom Cruise continued to abstain from publicizing his own politics on the Lions For Lambs press tour, the film’s director and co-star Robert Redford “lash[ed] out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” at a press conference in Rome yesterday. “We have lost lives, we’ve lost sacred freedoms, we’ve lost financial stability; we’ve lost our position of respect on the world stage,” said the sometime Sundance Kid.
• “The world’s first user-generated movie” begins shooting this week in London. MySpace users picked the director and some of the stars; Ewan Bremner’s in it, too. Be very afraid.
• I’m not sure exactly what “two-way plug-and-play technology” entails, but the MPAA thinks it puts their copyrights at risk, and they want the FCC to ban consumer electronics manufacturers from making and selling it.

Anne Thompson points to the red-banded trailer for the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men. In order to watch it, you have to prove that you’re over 17 by entering your birthday and zip code, as it corresponds to your government-issued ID. Leaving aside the fact that it’s totally creepy that movie studios now have access to some massive DMV database (that’s gotta be where they’re getting this info from, since the site wouldn’t accept the zip code on my passport), if you prefer Blood Simple to The Big Lebowski, then this trailer will likely be right up your alley. Warning: it’s, um, kind of violent. I counted at least 6 corpses, plus 2 implied human deaths, plus one definitely dead dog.

• Focus Features has accepted an NC-17 rating for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, despite the fact that it will seriously hamper the film’s chances of reaching the audience it needs to gain critical mass come Oscar time. According to The Hollywood Reporter, although the film contains no full-frontal male nudity, “male-on-female oral sex, non-S&M restraints and several nontraditional sexual positions are depicted, conveying the aggression and emotional conflict between the main characters.”
• Unfortunately, it looks like DGA members won’t be able to enjoy any of that in the comfort of their own homes. First the Directors Guild of America said studios could send their members award season screeners; then they said they couldn’t; then they said they were planning to say they could, but now they’ve said that they can’t.
• With male and female audiences divided over the equally drecky-looking Scarlett Johansson vehicle The Nanny Diaries, and the Jet Li/Jason Statham fight pic War, Variety says SuperBad has a chance at pulling off another weekend at the top of the box office. In related news, Knocked Up is a huge hit in Australia and Russia.
• Anger Me, a documentary in which former child star/experimental filmmaker/Hollywood Babylon muckraker Kenneth Anger tells stories about his own life for two hours, earns the ultimate backhanded compliment from Variety: “Tech credits are adequate.”

Good news for fans of Eyes Wide Shut: a new DVD edition of Stanley Kubrick’s final film is on the way, complete with rated and unrated versions of the film, plus two documentaries, commentary from Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, and more. It will be available for purchase on its own, or as part of a nine-disc Kubrick collection, coming out in late October.

And if you read the above and immediately thought to yourself, “WHAT fans of Eyes Wide Shut?”, you should go read this appreciation of the film by Jeffrey M. Anderson. For several years I’ve thought (mostly in a lazy, cocktail chatter sort of way) of writing a book about Eyes Wide Shut — not so much the movie itself as the press surrounding its production, Kubrick’s death, the controversy surrounding preparing the film for MPAA approval, and its reception amongst both critics and audiences. Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence–something happens and I think, “Oh, nobody cares about that movie.”

Jeffrey’s post–and, especially, the comments it has engendered–has possibly convinced me otherwise. It’s one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they’re all basically saying, “Finally, it’s okay for me to come out of the closet about this.”

The Motion Picture Association of America (AKA the MPAA, AKA the mysterious cabal that sits somewhere on the crux of government, religion and commerce, whose primary function is to devise movie ratings) has been paying an inordinate amount of attention to Captivity, a low-budget torture flick that opens this Friday. In March, the MPAA threatened to withhold rating the film unless the studio releasing it, Lionsgate, removed a series of billboards that were drawing complaints. Lionsgate complied, but still allowed Captivity producer Courtney Solomon to mouth off to the New York Times about how the premiere party for the film would feature cage fighting, torture rooms, and Suicide Girls as on-the-clock “dates” for select fans.

That party happened last night, and according to FishbowlLA, the MPAA threatened to pull Captivity’s R-rating after learning that Solomon and his party planners had actually used the discarded billboards to wrap the outside of the Sunset Strip club where the party was to take place. After receiving a call from the MPAA’s Marilyn Gordon a few hours before show time, Solomon says he had the billboards moved inside the event venue, but is nonetheless “expecting a call” from the ratings board this morning to learn his punishment.

If the MPAA were to remove Captivity’s rating, the teen-targeted pic wouldn’t be able to screen in most multiplexes when it opens on Friday. So obviously this is a big deal for Solomon and Lionsgate–but do the MPAA really have the jurisdiction to pull ratings based on the marketing materials used at a private event? Where’s Kirby Dick when we really need him–and would he even care about a breach of ethics involving torture porn?