In the United States the people responsible for rating movies (the MPAA) are kept totally anonymous. It would make sense to include psychologists capable of judging the potential psychological harm of a movie and film experts who are able to judge the artistic merit of the films they are rating. This does not seem to be the case in America. Finding out who these people are is the main focus of the film. Kirby has gone for the Michael Moore/Nick Broomfield style of film-making. It becomes a documentary about making a documentary rather than just about its ostensible subject. We get plenty of boring scenes of private investigators trying to find out who is on the MPAA ratings board.
Slightly more interesting is the discussion with film-makers, who mostly just complain that some of their films got R rated. It shows that sexual content is rated higher than violent content and that films with homosexual content are rated higher than those with only heterosexual sexual content.
One of the talking heads refers to film classification (not censorship, just ratings) as 'fascist' without a hint of hyperbole. Kirby Dick seems to agree. I enjoyed the directors earlier film Bob Flanagan Supermasochist and have an interest in censorship. However, this is a lousy and totally unbalanced movie.
1/5
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