It’s certainly no accident that The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman found out about and reported on Bruno initially receiving an NC-17 rating from the MPAA. After all, what raunchy docu-comedy wouldn’t want additional buzz focused on how “objectionable” some scenes were? Universal and Sacha Baron Cohen obviously pushed the envelope in order to both see how much they could get away with and to draw attention to themselves with a desired NC-17. Hasn’t anyone been following Hollywood the past 10 years? Here are a few benefits to both garnering the unacceptable rating and having news of that “unfortunate” rating leaked to all the fanboy bloggers:
- Typical outrage over the MPAA’s dealings guarantee postings (including this one), which continue to give attention to the film.
- Excitement over how hard the ultimate R-rating will likely be continues the interest from moviegoers interested in raunchy content. And if they’re upset that it won’t be as dirty as the original NC-17 version they can always…
- …look forward to the Unrated DVD release, which will most definitely include the censored “objectionable” scenes either in the movie or as supplement material.
Of course, news of the ratings controversy does draw potentially unfair complaints regarding the MPAA’s reputation for typically having problems with homosexual themes. For once, though, the gay community can leave the ratings board alone on this one, since the studio and filmmakers most certainly wanted all of this. Of course, if you do decide to protest, make sure you mention the film title often. That will help the marketing, too.
And now some of the unnecessary complaints from my fellow internerds helping with the film’s buzz:
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Forget trying to maneuver your way through all the mixed reactions to Watchmen crowding the interweb today. There’s only one question you need to answer, apparently, in order to make up your mind whether or not to see the highly anticipated adaptation: are you okay with a massive blue penis in an R-rated comic book movie, or will you be offended and demand an apology from the MPAA? Over at the site Movieguide, which is partnered with The Christian Film & Television Commission, organization chairman and “spokesmen” (is he multiple people?) Dr. Ted Baehr is quoted as saying Watchmen should have received an NC-17 rating for its constant display of male anatomy, and he claims the MPAA has agreed to bring the complaint to their ratings board. And finally, with the defensive against nudity being necessary to any film, Baehr says, “After all, would ‘Casablanca’ become an even better work of art if the script contained a bunch of “f” words, or if Ingrid Bergman appeared completely nude? Definitely not!”
Well, personally I wouldn’t have a problem if Bogie cursed a lot, though I agree that Bergman was always great despite always having her clothes on. As for the blue penis issue, though, I have to remind folks that blue-skinned nudity is not the same as realistic flesh-colored nudity, and that whether it’s Rebecca Romijn in the X-Men films or a digital replica of Billy Crudup in Watchmen or the eagerly awaited Smurfette shower scene in Sony’s upcoming Smurfs movie, the ratings board will likely be okay with it. As will most anyone else that doesn’t have a lame obligation to excessively puritanical groups like the CFTVC.
Sample quotes and links from those internerds who disagree with Baehr, as well as some who actually agree, after the jump:
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Is it possible that Jeff Wells and The Playlist’s shared gloomy outlook on 2009 Oscar bait (or lack thereof) has anything to do with the fact that neither Kate Winslet nor Marisa Tomei has a film coming out this year? And that even if they had something coming soon, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t get naked for it? Probably this fact and subfact have nothing to do with their premature worries, and it’s just a coincidence that the internerds were hit by the misfortunate news that Winslet is giving up onscreen nudity plus the clarification from Tomei that she’s actually not in a nudity phase of her life.
After the jump, some of the more together reactions (meaning the ones not from gossip blogs claiming Winslet hates us).
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With Mary Bronstein’s Yeast debuting on DailyMotion tonight, and Joe Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends opening this weekend at the IFC Center, the two SXSW 2008 premieres starring Greta Gerwig will suddenly become available to a non-festival audience simultaneously. When I heard this was going to happen, I dug up some of the press Gerwig has garnered over the past year, most of it pegged to her appearance in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead. I quickly noticed a trend: Gerwig has been covered exhaustively by male writers who a) have a tendency to label her an “ingenue” or an “‘it’ girl“, and b) devote much column space to the question of whether or not Gerwig’s main talent is playing herself.
Certainly, the great success of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the highly improvised project on which the pixie-cute actress collaborated with Swanberg and friends, is that it parts of it seem so lacking in cinematic artifice, they can play as glimpses into lives in progress. But if Hannah seems real enough to reach through the screen and touch, Gerwig’s title character is too exasperating to make that a particularly attractive proposition (or maybe not: almost like a classic femme fatale, it’s hard to deny her appeal even as she’s leaving you for your best friend). So when in Baghead, she plays a pixie-cute actress collaborating with friends on a highly improvised project––who drinks too much, takes little convincing to remove her top, and ultimately ends up with the funny, schlubby nerd––it seems too coincidental to be fiction, and apparently too cute to resist.
Gerwig hasn’t resisted the suggestion that the roles she plays grow out of who she is, but Nights and Yeast add two disparate but fully realized characters to her repertoire. Yeast is, for some, an endurance exercise; for me, it’s a comedy, and on the contrary, it’s the comparatively gentle but fundamentally flawed Nights and Weekends (on which Gerwig is billed as co-writer/director alongside Swanberg, and co-producer alongside Swanberg, Anish Savjani and Dia Sokol) which tries patience. If the latter shows Gerwig pushing a character way beyond adorable, it often feels like an exhausting exercise for all involved. It’s her work as Yeast’s only semi-relatable comic relief that throws up a middle finger at the ingenue concept, literally.
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Olly Blackburn’s sexy thriller Donkey Punch premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and we caught it as part of Fantastic Fest, where it was paired with a “Hipsters Overboard!” Donkey Punch Boat Party on Town Lake in Austin, which sadly did not involve the actually tossing overboard of any hipsters. Austin has tight jean, rakish-angle hat-wearing party rats coming out of the woodwork, and it probably would have been a benefit if some had slipped into the dark water, never to be seen again.
The film is what you would get if you mashed Dead Calm and Open Water 2 together and sprinkled it liberally with heavy doses of ecstasy and trance club music. I know that it probably doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in a review when you reference Open Water 2: Adrift in the second paragraph, but that film should have had a title of its own and not been a sequel, because it’s not a bad Saturday afternoon thriller itself. Plus, it also involves a gaggle of young hipsters who shouldn’t be out on a luxury yacht.
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Agnes Varnum points to a preview clip on New York Magazine’s website, from the upcoming third season of Joe Swanberg’s Nerve.com series, Young American Bodies. In a very inside-baseball bit of humor, the clip features Swanberg himself literally in bed with film festival programmer Holly Herrick. Both appear in various states of undress, so don’t watch it at work. And if you’re a Swanberg fan, keep your eyes on SpoutBlog, as we’ll have a surprise from Joe here within the next 24 hours.
As I understand it, the Supreme Court is *not* arguing, as Nikki Finke puts it, to make it a “crime to see American Beauty or Lolita.” The Reuters report is, admittedly, poorly written, so I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. But I *think* the law would not make it illegal to make or see a film depicting an underage person being naked or having sex; I *think* it would ban anyone from promoting such a film as containing teen sex or nudity. So the image from American Beauty to the right would be a-okay within the context of the film, but could not be distributed as an advertisement for the film. Even though Mena Suvari was 20 when the film was released, because the character she plays is underage. Right? Am I wrong? Tell me what’s really going on so I can pick a side.
