With only a couple of weeks until Halloween, moviegoers can expect to be inundated with a slew of horror films, all depicting varying levels of terror, gore and gruesome violence. Yet, all of these cringe-worthy films manage to elicit an R"" rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), whereas one movie scheduled for release this Halloween, Kevin Smith's ""Zach and Miri Make a Porno,"" was almost given an NC-17 rating due to the frank sexual nature of the film.
The NC-17 rating is a kiss of death for filmmakers, as few video stores, advertisers or theaters will touch a movie with an NC-17 rating. Smith has a long history of being a controversial filmmaker, ranging from the blasphemous humor of ""Dogma"" to the simply profane humor of ""Clerks,"" ""Mallrats"" and ""Chasing Amy."" This history of toeing the line, along with other acts of general idiocy - including joining a picket line to protest his own movie and starting confrontational arguments with noted film critics Joel Sigel and Richard Roeper - certainly did not endear him to the MPAA. So when Smith presented his film for rating, the committee did him no favors.
""Zach and Miri"" star Seth Rogen confirmed that an NC-17 rating is ""never good"" and commented on the unfairness of the sexuality/violence double standard.
""It's really crazy to me that 'Hostel' is fine, with people gouging their eyes out and shit like that, but you can't show two people having sex - that's too much,"" he said, in an interview with MTV Movie News.
Lucky for Rogen, Smith pulled off a rare feat by successfully appealing the rating. Smith gathered scenes from other movies that had been rated R in the past, and showed how each compared to ""Zach and Miri,"" effectively offering a point-by-point rebuttal of the MPAA's logic.
Smith's situation was an unfortunate one, but in the end, he emerged victorious. The irony of the situation is, by earning the R rating, Smith can follow the typical path carved by raunchy sex comedies in the past few years: release a PG-13 or R-rated version of the film in theaters, then offer a ""wild, crazy, unrated version"" on DVD. ""Come see the film they DIDN'T let us show you in theaters,"" the voiceover raves, as images of scantily clad women flash across the screen. Yet, what would appear to be a rebellious circumvention of the MPAA's stringent rules usually amounts to little more than outtakes and two minutes of forgettable footage.
While I have disagreed with the MPAA's methods throughout history, from the production codes of the 1920s to the current set of arbitrary rules (How many F-bombs can a PG-13 movie drop again?), they still don't annoy me nearly as much as Hollywood studios that fool witless viewers into thinking they're going to be getting a markedly different film from the original version.
Is a PG-13 film like ""Anchorman"" really fooling anyone by releasing an unrated version? There won't be any nudity or gruesome violence, we're just going to hear Will Ferrell say a particularly off-color expression, like ""By the hammer of Thor, my heart is more broken than the Virgin Mary's hymen!"" Was it really worth the additional viewing? For fans of incredibly inappropriate religious humor, perhaps. But for the casual viewer who shelled out $15.99 for the director's cut DVD, it's more disappointing than Jesus riding a...
For the rest this joke, you can purchase the unrated version of ""Citizen Slane"" by sending a PayPal payment of $15.99 to kevslane@gmail.com.
