Sunday

We're currently right between visitors and a looming calendar full of May activities, so we've sort-of played it low-key this weekend. We saw This Film is Not Yet Rated,* a one-sided hot-pursuit of the mysterious, often wrongheaded, American MPAA rating system. In the film, director Kirby Dick hires a private investigation of the rating panel's confidential staff while enlisting notable talking heads to badmouth their experiences with the procedure. While real issues are touched upon offhandedly (extreme prejudice against sex over violence, four decades of mounting prudishness, and the lack of representative oversight to this taste-making organ), mostly its dissent is offered with nary a counterpoint and applied with a figurative hammer. It's often mentioned that hard-to-appeal NC-17 ratings are box office anathema, as is refusing a rating altogether; but the real culprits here, distributors and venues refusing to promote adult subject matter, are hardly fingered in favor of a lambaste of the rating institution itself. This is offered up as de facto censorship so often (and so often with the "de facto" omitted) that viewers can be forgiven for leaving the movie misunderstanding that filmmakers have chosen to cut their films to the MPAA suggestion based on the carrot of a bigger payday than the stickless MPAA. Later, after a nice Indian dinner, we went out to see Spiderman 3,* which I liked far more than many reviewers. It's choppy and crammed with too many factors, sure; meanwhile, Director Sam Raimi's interests lie in the melodrama between characters shouldering heroic (or villainous) burdens rather than the spectacle of their day jobs. Still, his whimsy remains fresh and the movie remembers the rest of the world where other whiny hero films seem to dwell solely within the solipsism of the protagonists. Also, I just had a good time. [Cavin]