Latest News -- A New Academy Award Category!
for ten years, with porn just like its X predecessor, and most newspapers will not carry ads for NC-17 rated films. The biggest video store chain in the nation, Blockbuster, will not carry NC-17 rated films. So now NC-17 is a failure.
The only way that a new A rating will work is if this moronic stigma of porn is reserved only for an X rating, and A actually comes to represent a film that is strictly for adults, but not a porno film. Why this cannot be accomplished is beyond me. As it is, studios now force directors to trim scenes from their films just to make it into the now crowded R category, and when this happens, the art of motion pictures suffers. Stanley Kubrick shouldn't have had to digitally cover up the explicit sex scenes in EYES WIDE SHUT just to satisfy the R classification in America (the rest of the world saw the movie as it was shot). With an A rating, Kubrick would have been freer to produce the vision he had intended originally. Oliver Stone had to cut some 3 1/2 minutes of footage from his NATURAL BORN KILLERS to make it into an R, but even the R rated cut was a film that clearly should have only been for adults.
With a system like G, PG, PG-13, R, A, and X, we could have categories that made sense, and make sure that it's made clear that X is obviously pornography, while A is for serious, adults-only films. And theatres should carry them just as they would an R rated film. And the biggest issue of all is enforcement of the ratings ... theatres would have to step up to the task of making sure that kids don't sneak into films not meant for them. They may not be able to stop everybody all the time, but at least they will be trying. It would be all part of an overhaul in the quality of service provided by movie theatres, which is desperately needed as I discussed in a previous article.
Anyway, that's the latest Oscar and movie news ... I saw ALMOST FAMOUS a couple of weeks ago, and it is indeed an incredible film, definitely one of the best films to come out of what has been such a lackluster year. A slew of positive reviews are coming out now for the political
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