Movie Minesweeper - The I've Been Busy With A Beard Edition

- Access Hollywood have 16 pictures and a bit of hype for the upcoming Bionic Woman rehash, starring sometime Eastender Michelle Ryan.

- Helena Bonham Carter has spoken to the Telegraph and mentioned such films as Fight Club, Sweeney Todd and Harry Potter 5.

- Hatchet has apparently been branded NC-17 by the MPAA. That's only a problem because the chain multiplexes now won't touch it. My suggested solution? A lot more NC-17 films. The chains will have to budge then.

- Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong have talked Magicians (seen it, is good, review coming tomorrow) to The Scotsman.

- Icon are to release Christopher McQuarrie's The Stanford Prison Experiment. I bet it thrashes Oliver Hirschbiegel's film hands-down.

Normal service will be resumed as of Monday.

Live Free Or Die Limp?

Aint it Cool reported an upcoming Vanity Fair piece in which Bruce Willis expresses his displeasure at the likelihood of Die Hard 4.0 being released with a PG-13 certificate. The implication is that a PG-13 Die Hard 4.0 simply couldn't be as good as an R rated Die Hard 4.0. This strikes me as incredibly weak logic, for obvious reasons. I'll state them below anyway.

The Willis dissents story has spread across the web and the consensus seems to be that people are siding with Bruno. Makes me sigh, I'm afraid. What on earth is the connection between a film's quality and the MPAA rating it receives? Aren't there a whole heap of action classics with PG-13 ratings? Yes, there are. And when Die Hard 4.0 fails to live up to a long list of them and it's problems become apparent, how many of those problems could be resolved by including more profanity or nudity or making the violence more explicit?

I don't see what it is in the Die Hard concept that cries out for R-rated material to succeed. It needs a strong plot, well conceived action sequences and to be executed with skill and flair. That's what it needs - not pandering to the pubescent and pseudo-adult juvenilia.

Having said all of this, if a film is censored from a natural, organic R rating to acheive a PG-13 for marketing, that's a different argument entirely. But, of course, Die Hard 4.0 is almost certain to have been designed as a mass-market PG-13 product from day one.

Some Punishment

ShockTilYouDrop - them again - have the exclusive first look at the first Captivity trailer. It is about 50% shots down Elisha Cuthert's cleavage, about 50% not-strictly-accurate slogans selling the film on the basis of the MPAA's infamous punishments against the film's advertising campaign. The film will be better than this.

Hatchet Teaser, MPAA Madness

Finally, the teaser for Hatchet has appeared and you can download it now. Not quite as nifty as the 'gorehound patriot' poster, which you can see above. The film has been given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA who are obviously on a bit of a power tip at the moment. Rather amazingly they've given Stardust an R rating for 'fantasy violence'. I'm sure it has less fantasy violence - and less violent fantasy violence - than Return of the King and less risque gags - a less risque risque gags - than Carry on Inserting Carry On Type Titles Here Missus.

Added to their cruel and unusual punishment for the Captivity poster 'crimes', it seems like the MPAA have been axed grinding rather a lot of late. Are they embarrased, underneath of it all, from Kirby Dick's full-on attack in This Film Is Not Yet Rated?

[EDIT: Martyn Drake has debunked the Stardust story and I can't thank him enough. The Hollywood Reporter have been passing off bad information. Again]

Captivity Cornered

The Hollywood Reporter have detailed the MPAA's punishments for the Captivity billboard 'incident'.

Apparently, they've placed a month long freeze on any ratings action associated with the film itself. Essentially, this means the film can't be seen by the MPAA for a rating before May 1st - not long before the release date of May 18th.

Should the MPAA then demand cuts, it seems unlikely a new version of the film could be submitted and passed in time.

Something tells me the MPAA are going to demand cuts.

This all strikes me as somewhat draconian. Inhibiting advertising on the film makes more sense - these billboards were clearly irresponsible, and I can see that the MPAA have some grounds for action there - but cornering the filmmakers in this way and jeopardising the film's release date is, at best, somewhat extreme.

Some might even see this as an utterly unnecessary intervention.

Of course, the MPAA are always being framed as the bad guys when all they're trying to do is protect the young and innocent from seeing harmful material, right?

Wrong. No country that operates something like the R rating could ever make this claim. In America, I could legitimately take a fve year old child to see Hostel. I couldn't, however, go alone to see a film like Where the Truth Lies without quite some effort - it was awarded an NC-17 rating and the big chains therefore passed on booking it, I'd have to find a smaller place that took the risk. In some counties, if not states, that can prove to be very tricky.

The MPAA are pandering to some very disturbing moral and ethical biases that, thankfully, aren't shared by the majority of the American public.

The solution is quite clear to me, though: adopt a model closer to the BBFC's system in the UK. The equivalent of the R here, or more or less at least, is the 18 certificate. This means that nobody under 18 can see the film at all. We also have a 15 certificate - nobody under 15 admitted - and the more lenient 12A, PG and U, all of which allow children to attend screenings, with basic the basic proviso that an under 12 needs to be accompanied by an adult to a 12A screening.

That way, adults can see (more or less) what they wish, and the delicate little eyes of the kiddy-winkies don't get sullied by, for example, the incarceration and humiliation of Elisha Cuthbert.

(Oh, and by the way, no punishment like this was prescribed after the Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare shenanigans. A perverse moral bias, as I said)