This Film is Not Yet Rated

Posted by Josh Anker (josh1234@gmail.com) on September 28, 2006

Release Date: September 1, 2006

This Film Not Yet Rated This Film Is Not Yet Rated, is at its heart, a documentary.

That’s a powerful statement, right there. And you’d better pay attention to it, if you use movie reviews to decide what you’ll spend your hard-earned money on. What you may have heard about the movie, and indeed, it’s generated a lot of buzz, is that a private investigator gets hired to get a sneak peek into the MPAA rating system.

Well, that almost makes it sound like a plot, with intrigue and action. Unfortunately for hyped-up viewers, it’s a documentary. Instead of excitement, the movie generated only vague feelings of surprise and disappointment in the rating system. Perhaps if I were a filmmaker I’d be far more outraged.

The film opened my eyes to a good deal of injustice that’s involved in the movie rating system. A group of people whose names are not released to the public rate a film completely arbitrarily. There are general guidelines governing the use of profanity and amount of sexual material, but it is entirely subject to the opinion of “the board.” I was enthusiastic about the plan to expose these anonymous, secret
people, going into it. The movie carefully builds up the MPAA and the 7 major Hollywood studios, emphasizing what media giants they are.

After all that, who wouldn’t want the little guy to win? Rooting for the underdog is the sole source of enthusiasm for This Film Is Not Yet Rated. We want Kirby Dick, the force behind the scheme and the movie, and his undercover investigation to win, simply because his
target is a big company who’s doing something behind closed doors and not justifying it.

Kirby Dick is a filmmaker. It’s clear, as the actual names of the people who decide ratings for movies are paraded across the screen amid much fanfare, that he thinks it’s the coup of the century to publicize their identities. To the casual viewer, however, they are nothing but names and faces.

When he finally succeeds in publicizing their identiies, it’s anticlimactic. Nothing about the system has been changed, there’s no
explosion or living happily ever after, and the movie is over. For an everyday movie watcher, there’s no satisfaction in that. The most redeeming value the movie has to the casual viewer is to shed some light on the rating system. I learned that it focuses nearly entirely on sexual content instead of violence. As a result, the documentary’s subject is entirely sex. It also heavily features only a few movies, including Boy’s Don’t Cry, A Dirty Shame and The Cooler.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a must-see if you hate “The Man,” you’re a film student, or you simply want to know the names of the people who work for an unjust company and rate movies.

The Upside: I got to hear about quite a few movies that I’d like to see, and weren’t highly publicized because of their rating.

The Downside: I’ve already seen the best scenes from them, and this movie didn’t have much meaning to me, since I’m not a director.

Final Grade: B