Bruno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow up to Borat, has received an NC-17 rating in its first submission to the MPAA, the shadowy cabal with the power to basically torpedo your movie if they want, since most theaters won’t show an NC-17 film.  In this case, however, since Bruno comes from a major studio (Universal), it will just get re-cut a few more times until they can get an R.

Among the objectionable scenes is one in which Bruno appears to have anal sex with a man on camera. In another, the actor goes on a hunting trip and sneaks naked into the tent of one of the fellow hunters, an unsuspecting non-actor.

Cohen is currently appealing the decision while simultaneously struggling with cutting the film to suit the ratings board. But the ratings board, a secret panel of parents appointed by the studio-owned movie association, is notoriously inexact about what it requires to move from an NC-17 to an R.

Audiences saw 20 minutes of Cohen’s latest foray into high-wire comedy at the South by SouthWest festival this month.

In one scene showed at the festival, Bruno auditioned children for a subversive movie with a number of offensive acts. Clueless stage moms agreed to the increasingly absurd requirements set forth by the actor, including one woman admitting that her infant daughter could lose seven pounds in a week to fit the part.

Finally, Bruno told her about the scene, in which the child had to dress as a Nazi pushing someone into an oven. [thewrap via theplaylist]

I’m so glad that there’s a group of unemployed moms in Burbank with the power to determine what kind of movie I get to see.  Without them we’d probably all be lining up for Air Bud 7: Doggy Shoots a Snuff Film.  Admit it, you’d buy a ticket.

Subjoke: Simulated anal sex and holocaust references?  Sounds like the time I went speed dating.

I never said Watchmen was the best film ever made.  But I did say everyone should see it, because if it doesn’t do well, studios will never make another adult-oriented comic book movie again.  Well guess what, it looks like that’s what’s happening. IESB claims a source at Warner is saying they’re unlikely to do another R-rated “tentpole” movie – and keep in mind they have Terminator Salvation coming out this summer and it’s still unrated. IESB says…

How much of the movie going market – specifically those that go to see superhero/genre films – is cut out by rating a film R versus a PG-13? Warner Bros. thinks too much and is said to be focusing solely on PG-13 rated superhero/tentpole films only, definitely harder than the “family friendly” superhero films of Fantastic Four but not in the R rated range. Think about it, the movie going audience is “huge”, now the genre/superhero movie going audience is a portion of that “huge” and the R rated/genre/superhero movie going audience is an even smaller portion of that “huge.”  [Oh my gosh, that required "huge" thinking!]
I liked Watchmen and thought it was a fantastic piece of filmmaking, but it’s definitely for adults only. And no kids will be asking mommy to buy them shirts or Rorschach masks from this one.

Oh yeah? I know at least one kid who will. The problem is, finance guys run movie studios, and finance guys’ jobs consist mainly of pretending they know something you don’t.  So instead of taking all factors into account and admitting that this stuff is near impossible to predict,  they just mash everything into some retarded business-school equation.  You can bet that if Rorschach had worn a red shirt for the entire movie, there’d be a no-more-characters-in-red-shirts memo going around WB this week.

About a month ago, Max Payne received an R-rating from the MPAA (which makes sense, considering it’s based on a shoot-em-up video game about whores and Satanists.  Back then, director John Moore had this to say:

[Getting a PG-13 rating] continues to be a challenge. We’re right in the middle of it now. We’re suffering from what I call Batman blowback. The Motion Picture Association of America gave The Dark Knight a PG-13 rating and basically sucked Warner Bros. cock. I have a serious amount of issues with the MPAA. Did you know it was made up of volunteers? As if that somehow excludes them from some type of wrongdoing. You can’t serve on it if you’re a homosexual or if you didn’t grow up in a shared parenthood home. Go to their website and read their charter about what gives a fair and balanced view for typical parents [Editor’s Note: All the MPAA’s website says is that Board members must be parents themselves and have “a shared parenthood experience”.  Doesn’t say anything about homosexuals one way or the other.]. We’re still strangled by an association that’s straight out of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But now that it’s received a PG-13, he had this to say:

Read the rest of this entry »

"Video game adaptation" is right up there with "full cavity search" and "Jonathan Taylor Thomas" when it comes to bile inducing three-word-phrases.   Still, even I have to admit that the trailer for Hitman looked kind of cool.  Plus, all that opera kinda makes me want to nail a fat chick with pigtails.  Or maybe just Bugs Bunny dressed as a fat chick with pigtails.

Anyway, the latest news is that, according to TwitchFilm, 20th Century Fox has taken Hitman out of the control of director Xavier Gens, who supposedly made an explicit, gore and head-shot-filled R movie; and put it in the hands of Nicolas De Toth.

Who’s De Toth?  He’s the man behind the edit of Live Free Or Die Hard, a job he was hired for specifically to turn in an entirely bloodless version of the film and word is that this is his task with Hit Man as well. [sic]

Gosh, I’m glad they’re sanitizing all this violence so that young children can see it.  Otherwise they’d grow up much too fast.  Like me, the first couple times I shot people in the face with a shotgun, I was confused when they didn’t turn all grey and smokey with their bills on the wrong side and little birdies flying around their head like Daffy Duck; they pretty much just laid there without a face and bled to death.  It took four or five times of this before I finally saw the birdies. And that, my friends, was the day I became a man.  

Roger Ebert this weekend denied reports that he had kept his TV show from using the "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down" rating system amid contract negotiations.

Ebert owns the thumbs-up/thumbs-down trademark with the estate of the late Gene Siskel, his original co-host. But the show's defining characteristic was absent from this weekend's episode, which marked the season premiere.

Perhaps they just stopped using it because it's the stupidest rating system ever devised.  In fact, in the middle east, you can get your thumbs cut off for using the thumbs up/thumbs down system.  They're very strict on patent laws over there. It's barbaric, really.

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