You all know that I try not to get too involved in the social conservative aspects of cultural discussions, largely because I am not one and I don’t like to be rude to people who are reliably 80% with-me otherwise. However, I must gently note something here about the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, and a certain reaction thereof. To with: “Anti-pornography watchdog group Morality in Media has taken issue with Fifty Shades of Grey’s R-rating, arguing that the rating “severely undermines the violent themes in the film and does not adequately inform parents and patrons of the film’s content.””
:cough: The books that this movie is based off of – and said books started off as Twilight fanfic that had the serial numbers filed off, which should give you an idea of my opinion about their literary merit* – have reportedly sold over 100 million copies worldwide. So I’m pretty sure that potential moviegoers already know that this movie is going to involve BDSM sex. Certainly the studio will not be shy about making that as clear as they possibly can…
Moe Lane
PS: Note the lack of Amazon links. That’s not morality, though: that’s sheer self-respect.
*Not that there’s anything wrong with fanfic, either.
my daughter read the first one and her scathing take down on the writing was beyond hysterically funny. The printable part: I could have written better as a sophomore in high school.
The ratings board has its arbitrary stands: your allowed so much nudity and so many f-bombs and keep an R rating. The studio would have insisted on the movie to be edited to avoid a NC17 death sentence.
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Oddly enough, bloodshed doesn’t seem to bother the board given the amount of gratuitous blood found in R movies like the remake of Evil Dead
The Brutality of a death doesn’t matter even that much. I noticed in the hobbit with the death close ups, like the slow impaling of certain characters. And I realized you know for some reason this is considered “ok” for kids but if you were to have a trickle of blood come out of the guys chest it wouldn’t. Weird. Gallons of fake blood isn’t to me all that disturbing, certainly not as much as seeing the light fade from a beloved character’s eyes.
I lament most that a lightly reworked Twilight slash fiction became a media hit. I’m no hater or lover of Twilight, but what the hell people. Come on. Have a little dignity.
Still, the film deserves an NC-17 rating.
We have the rating for a reason, and the reason for it, is films like this.
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I’m kind of dissapointed in my fellow man (or the distaff section of it anyway). I mean, *squick*
I would rather watch the NC-17-rated version of A Clockwork Orange than endure the R-rated Fifty Shades of Grey. The Kubrick movie had a point.
On the other hand, I knew* a woman who loved the execrable Exit to Eden, presumably for the S&M and not for Rosie O’Donnell in a leather corset. Gah. Different strokes, and whatever floats yer boat …
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* Not in the Biblical sense, thank God.
I watched that movie with horrified fascination: you could see the stitch marks where they grafted on new parts and themes with their unholy necro-cinematography. It’s a shame that nobody ever wrote a book about the horror show that must have been that production; I bet it’d make for fascinating reading.
From what I’m told, the director’s version of Exit To Eden did not have Rosie O’Donnell’s nor Dan Aykroyd’s characters at all; that whole overarching plot was added later to satisfy the producers, who were desperately trying to find a way to make the movie acceptable to the mainstream. Needless to say this was doomed to fail; if you’re making this kind of movie you need to make sure the people that liked the book also like the movie.
Personally, I’d like to see the director’s cut. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than what they released in the theaters.
Well certainly neither of them were in the book that it took it’s name (and very, very little else) from. I’m trying to think of other things that would be conceptually as bad – say, you could take de Sade’s Justine, and wrap an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” around it. Complete with an Angela Lansbury clone.
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Ugh, I just had a horrible thought – by writing this down, I probably caused this very thing to spring into being somewhere.
…That’s brilliant. Write it up, pitch it to Hollywood. We could get Sigourney Weaver to be the investigator, maybe give it a paranormal slant.
The other funny thing is I heard somewhere the MPAA rating for the movie said it was R for “unusual behavior”. I guess they don’t have a BDSM category.