docs vs. hollywood
Can there be any doubt we're living in the Documentary Decade?
I'm not talking about the hoopla over ABC's (seemingly) Republican-friendly "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, but about the crop of left-leaning documentaries that seem to have supplanted traditional investigative reporting in the national conversation.
The most obvious examples may be Fahrenheit 9-11, which I found entertaining but a little too giddy in its partisanship, and Morgan Spurlock's shocking Super Size Me, which made even mighty McDonalds retool its menu.
When Al Gore shows up on MTV's Video Music Awards to reenact a bit from An Inconvenient Truth (which has grossed more than $23 million), it's clear that there are seismic shifts happening on a national scale.
The BF and I are suckers for such.
We loved The Corporation and cringed at the low-production values but alarming message of Outfoxed, which takes on bias at Fox News.
The other weekend we happened across Why We Fight, one of the better entries in the recent spate of exposés, this one looking at why every president since Eisenhower has gotten America entangled in some foreign fight or another, and how our propensity for warfare is fueled — encouraged, in fact — by the rise of the military industrial complex.
It's scary stuff, but it casts the events of the last half century, and especially the last five years, in a gruesome new context.
Last night we caught another doc concerned with diabolical conspiracies, shady government characters and the rise of American agression, though this one focused on the questionable dealings of the folks who rate movies.
This Film is Not Yet Rated takes on the unchecked power of the MPAA, a top-secret board of supposed parents who decide how many seconds of an on-screen orgasm constitute an NC-17 rating — as opposed to how many bullets in the face can pass as a PG-13. (Quite a few, it turns out.) The movie makes a valiant effort in showing that the ratings process should be more transparent, and handled elsewhere.
I was personally shocked and offended to learn that two members of the clergy — Episcopal and Catholic priests — actually sit in and vote on the appeals proceedings. It's censorship at its finest, with an empowered few legislating morality from a secret star chamber.
Gays get especially shafted (pun not intended) in the ratings process, with any hint of homo-love landing NC-17s, while the same scenes with straight people get Rs. Oddly enough, the board seems equally grossed out by women having orgasms. Extended scenes of female bliss are often censured, or so argues the filmmakers.
It's a flawed documentary, sure. Director Kirby Dick obviously fancies himself as a sort of Michael Moore-esque crusader for the film industry, and as in Moore's flicks, his own time on camera tends to the weakest. There's a whole ridiculous plot involving a private eye who chases around members of the MPAA trying to nail their identities, which felt to me like a bad episode of "Remington Steele." Still, Dick's argument about the industry is cogent, and I'm curious to see if anything comes of it.
Best of all, the film was funded by Netflix, which surely has a stake in the way movies are rated. Then again, isn't Netflix sort of the antidote to big Hollywood telling us which flicks are fit for mass-consumption?
I'm not talking about the hoopla over ABC's (seemingly) Republican-friendly "docudrama" The Path to 9/11, but about the crop of left-leaning documentaries that seem to have supplanted traditional investigative reporting in the national conversation.
The most obvious examples may be Fahrenheit 9-11, which I found entertaining but a little too giddy in its partisanship, and Morgan Spurlock's shocking Super Size Me, which made even mighty McDonalds retool its menu.
When Al Gore shows up on MTV's Video Music Awards to reenact a bit from An Inconvenient Truth (which has grossed more than $23 million), it's clear that there are seismic shifts happening on a national scale.
The BF and I are suckers for such.We loved The Corporation and cringed at the low-production values but alarming message of Outfoxed, which takes on bias at Fox News.
The other weekend we happened across Why We Fight, one of the better entries in the recent spate of exposés, this one looking at why every president since Eisenhower has gotten America entangled in some foreign fight or another, and how our propensity for warfare is fueled — encouraged, in fact — by the rise of the military industrial complex.
It's scary stuff, but it casts the events of the last half century, and especially the last five years, in a gruesome new context.
Last night we caught another doc concerned with diabolical conspiracies, shady government characters and the rise of American agression, though this one focused on the questionable dealings of the folks who rate movies.This Film is Not Yet Rated takes on the unchecked power of the MPAA, a top-secret board of supposed parents who decide how many seconds of an on-screen orgasm constitute an NC-17 rating — as opposed to how many bullets in the face can pass as a PG-13. (Quite a few, it turns out.) The movie makes a valiant effort in showing that the ratings process should be more transparent, and handled elsewhere.
I was personally shocked and offended to learn that two members of the clergy — Episcopal and Catholic priests — actually sit in and vote on the appeals proceedings. It's censorship at its finest, with an empowered few legislating morality from a secret star chamber.
Gays get especially shafted (pun not intended) in the ratings process, with any hint of homo-love landing NC-17s, while the same scenes with straight people get Rs. Oddly enough, the board seems equally grossed out by women having orgasms. Extended scenes of female bliss are often censured, or so argues the filmmakers.
It's a flawed documentary, sure. Director Kirby Dick obviously fancies himself as a sort of Michael Moore-esque crusader for the film industry, and as in Moore's flicks, his own time on camera tends to the weakest. There's a whole ridiculous plot involving a private eye who chases around members of the MPAA trying to nail their identities, which felt to me like a bad episode of "Remington Steele." Still, Dick's argument about the industry is cogent, and I'm curious to see if anything comes of it.
Best of all, the film was funded by Netflix, which surely has a stake in the way movies are rated. Then again, isn't Netflix sort of the antidote to big Hollywood telling us which flicks are fit for mass-consumption?
1 Comments:
awesome post.
three older ones that shaped my viewpoints forever:
* 'paragraph 175,' about gay men and women exterminated by the nazis;
* 'the celluloid closet,' which is the film follow-up to the book on how gay subtext and culture has appeared throughout the history of film;
* and 'the life and times of harvey milk,' about, well, the life and death of our first openly gay politician.
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