Who's Afraid Of Ang Lee?

[summertime]

Who's Afraid Of Ang Lee?

By S. JAMES SNYDER

September 21, 2007


Chan Kam Chuen

The director's acclaimed new film has been slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating, S. James Snyder writes. Is America ready to look the other way? Above, Tang Wei stars in Ang Lee's new film, 'Lust, Caution.'

It's been a long time since "Midnight Cowboy" made history in 1969 when it became the first and only Xrated film to win the Academy Award for best picture. In the intervening 38 years, the Motion Picture Association of Americahas replaced the "X" rating with the alphabetically friendlier NC-17 and has invented the PG-13 rating. Thanks to the mass-marketing mind-set that has been made possible in large part by PG-13 blockbusters, the MPAA ratings process — centered around the decisions of a few dozen California parents — exerts more power today over the movie business than ever before.

It's a system that has infuriated more than a handful of critics (chief among them Roger Ebert) and filmmakers (notably Kirby Dick, who outed the members and procedures of the secretive MPAA in his recent documentary, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated"), who claim that the process is so insulated and subjective, and so biased against sexual content while being so lenient with violence, that few serious films featuring sexual content can be made without earning an NC-17 rating — and the stigma that comes with it.

All of which makes next Friday's bigscreen premiere of Ang Lee's NC-17-rated "Lust, Caution" that much more remarkable. In the last decade, only a few scattered films have arrived in movie theaters with an NC-17 rating. "Descent," a film sporting two violent rape sequences, had its premiere at this year's Tribeca Film Festival before receiving an extremely limited release on only two screens (total American box office: $15,000). In 2004, the sexually ambiguous Pedro Almodóvar whirlwind "Bad Education" (American box office: $5.2 million), and the sexually liberated Bernardo Bertolucci film "The Dreamers" (American box office: $2.5 million) made brief appearances.

More common are films such as Darren Aronofsky's Oscar-nominated "Requiem for a Dream" and Larry Clark's 1995 notorious "Kids," which refuse to accept the NC-17 label altogether and enter theaters as unrated works. But the standard maneuver for films slapped with the dreaded NC-17 rating — such as Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" and the Hilary Swank breakthrough "Boys Don't Cry" — is to go to extraordinary lengths to re-edit and reshoot (or in Mr. Kubrick's case, digitally insert bodies to obscure an "objectionable" on-screen orgy) in an effort to reduce the number of pelvic thrusts, the amount of pubic hair, or the types of sexual positions to meet the MPAA guidelines for an R-rated film.

http://www.nysun.com/article/63144

[Marie]

Oh, the hypocracy of it all!

American teenagers are generally more sexually adventuresome than people of my generation. I'm in my 40s and came of age in the wild 70s when, so we thought, anything went sexually speaking. How naive we all were back in the 70s. What young people are up to these days is light years beyond what we were doing at their age. Things that would still give us pause even now don't cause them to bat an eye. Who is protecting whom with this NC-17 rating? Maybe it is the parents trying to protect themselves from sexual activity that their children find quite blasé? What a riot! What the kids need to see in Lust, Caution is not the exotic positions (nothing new for them there) but the emotional content of those sex scenes. That is something that would shock the hell out of them. "What do you mean, sex is supposed to mean something between two people and not just be a form of feel-good entertainment when I'm bored?" Let's shock the hell out of the young people by showing them the real depth and power of human sexuality and stop being fixated on its Kama Sutra trappings. Ang Lee, you are a subversive filmmaker in ways you couldn't even imagine. Your film will shock, just not for the reasons everyone thinks.

Marie