Racy content earns Gold Town film NC-17 rating
This week’s movie at the Gold Town Nickelodeon is called “Blue is the Warmest Color.” This film is universally lauded and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival, a feat that puts it in the same ranks as “Amour,” “The Pianist,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Piano,” “Barton Fink,” and a little film from a while back called, “Apocalypse Now.”Near as I can tell, it’s the only NC-17 movie to have won the Palme d’Or.
By all accounts, this film is a moving coming of age story of a teenager’s blossom into adulthood — a trite, but tried and true, motif. So good in fact that some theaters have waved the NC-17 requirement for teenagers as long as parents are informed about what they’re getting into. The Gold Town Nickelodeon plans to do this as well.
The Motion Picture Association of America established the NC-17 rating in the late 1980s. The MPAA board attaches NC-17 ratings to movies with such (theoretically) explicit adult material that no parent would want their child to see the film. Officially, the rating can be based on “violence, sex, aberrational behavior, drug abuse or any other element that most parents would consider too strong.”
No children 17 or under are allowed in to an NC-17 movie.
Children can attend an R-rated movie as long as they are accompanied by an adult.
I’m not going to bash the concept of a rating system. I’m a parent and there should be some guide to help us make entertainment choices for ourselves and our kids. Nor am I such a prude as to think a family could never go to, say, an R-rated film. The R-rated movie “Terms of Endearment” is a defining movie for me. I saw it when I was 11 with my parents. For the first time I was engrossed in a film tackling adult themes like death and divorce.
I will bash how the MPAA applies ratings. Bursts of bad language tag otherwise tame films — like “Terms of Endearment,” “Plains, Trains, and Automobiles,” “The King’s Speech,” and many others — with an R-rating. These are great films. I’d have no problems letting my 10 year old see them. Yet the same R-rating applies to torture-porn bloodbaths like “Hostel,” or “Saw.” These movies, and their serial killer ilk, highlight sliced body parts, exploding body parts, anguished screams, and other terrible sick things.
And then there’s sex. I don’t know how many of us adults have ever had our Achilles tendon sliced by a torturer (“Hostel”), but many of us have had sex. Yet the MPAA treats sex much like a good ol’ ankle slicing. The moment a boob, butt, or phallus appears, you might as well open up the cavity of a co-ed camper and bathe in her guts. An R-rating will be slapped on the movie like a postal worker slaps a stamp on a Christmas package.
My guess is the rating system is bean counting. Count the number of curse words, meet a threshold, get an R. Whoops, there a flexing buttocks; get an R. One gut shot gets a PG-13; you need two for an R. One gallon of blood is PG; it’ll take a couple more for an R.
Ratings make no sense. The gatekeepers of cultural decency have codified an equivalency between nudity, sex, and language, and gunshots to the head. I would even go so far as to say the gatekeepers prioritize censoring sex and language over violence. In fact, a recent study found more gunplay in PG-13 films today than in R films 20 years ago. (www.cnn.com/2013/11/11/health/gun-violence-movies/index.html).
You would think then, given the “violence, sex, aberrational behavior, drug abuse” the MPAA must consider for an NC-17, that an NC-17 film must show the most graphic depictions of human depravity — the hell of slavery, the tragedy of child abuse, the aftermath of nuclear war. You’d be wrong. By and large, only one of those four criteria lead to an NC-17: frank depictions of sex.
So parents, as a public service, if you are considering bringing your teen to “Blue is the Warmest Color,” allow me to inform you about what you’re getting in to. This movie about two teenagers who fall in love has at some point about ten minutes of frank, explicit, well-lit, lesbian sex.
And I don’t care how relaxed you are about sex, it’s still going to be awkward sitting next to your teenager as two females get down on screen for a loooooong time.
This could be good though. If your parenting goal is for your child to delay sex, then there is no better strategy than to associate yourself — the parent — with sex. It’s a strategy scientifically proven to shrivel the pituitary gland. You could, if so inclined, lean over at some point during the long lesbian sex scene and ask, “Do you have a pen. I may need to take notes.” Then whisper at some point, “Wow!” and maybe follow that up with a barely audible, “Might have to try that with your mom.”
The kid’s not having sex for the next 20 years.
But hey, maybe the sex thing is too icky. You can always take them to the current blockbuster, a PG-13 action adventure showcasing plenty of morally uplifting stabbings, whippings, and arrows to the chest.
Sex, Love and Brooklyn: One Full-Body Orgasm, Please!
Posted by Lacy Warner
It was all downhill from there.
When I was 23, I went to a 70s-era, 3D porno at the Sunshine with a bunch of my co-workers. We thought it was going to be a riot and even brought umbrellas to open during the money-shot, Rocky Horror-style. Then the movie started. Bizarrely, every single one of us collectively slouched down into our seats. We were all thinking, “Holy shit, I'm watching porn with Bob from HR. And he's having way too good a time.”
You'd think I would've learned my lesson. But no. Not at all. And that's why I thought it would be a good idea to go on a date to see Blue Is The Warmest Color.
The truth is, I've been holding out on you guys. I've actually been seeing someone for a couple of months now, and the movie was going to be our fifth or sixth date. I really like him. He's a funny, smart, and charming film critic—who also seemed very kind. But each and every time we got to fooling around, he drew a blank in the bedroom. It wasn't his fault and it wasn't my fault either. I wish to God it had been someone's fault, though, because then we could have fixed it and moved on. But alas, something just wasn't clicking between us when we got between the sheets.
He told me he had watched a lot of porn as a teenager, but had weened himself off this habit as an adult. This could have been a vulnerable confession on his part, and maybe I should have been more sympathetic, but all I heard was “I don't understand how to relate to real women, and so I have a hard time getting turned on by you.” I suggested that maybe we watch porn together, but he vehemently declined. He said he was too embarrassed.
Not one to be discouraged however, I decided that this “film buff” and I needed to see this new, super-erotic lesbian movie, complete with a 7-minute sex scene. If he didn't have a boner after that, then God help him, because there was nothing left I could do.
I must have spent the past three weeks under a rock, because I promise you that going into this movie all I knew was that there was a very graphic 7-minute lesbian sex scene. I had heard nothing about the actresses', Lea Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, outrage over their working conditions. I didn't know that they felt exploited and would not ever again work with the director, Abdellatif Kechiche.
I'd heard nothing about the graphic novelist, Julie Maroh, (whose work the movie is based on) stating that what the film had needed was “real” lesbians on set. And finally, I had heard nothing about how the whole state of Iowa won't even show the movie. I was just ready to sit next to my man in a dark theatre watching the only type of “blue” flick he wasn't too embarrassed to see with me.
And here's the thing, I loved the sex scenes in the movie. Having slept with women as well as men, I felt they were an honest depiction of sex—not even specifically lesbian sex, but of the kind of sex you have with the first person you fall in love with. The first sex is the kind that eats away at you long after you're done eating out the other person. It's the kind of sex where you're glad you can still smell your partner on you when you go home.
Let's just say I got the sex scenes and didn't have a problem with them.
However, I did have a problem with a very minor character named Joachim. Joachim is a predatory gallery owner who tries to seduce everyone in his path. In one scene at a garden party, he waxes on and on about the mystical female orgasm, and how it's the life force for the whole world. All the lesbians around him laugh and nod in approval. I think this was the biggest clue into the director's predatory male gaze. And, in fact, the lead actress Adele, was quoted as saying in the New Yorker, “Kechiche is 'obsessed,' with women … observing them, solving their 'mystery.'”
Gag me.
However, after the movie, I discovered my seduction plan had worked: my date was fired up, ready to go home and hit the hay. We started to fool around, but then he paused and told me he would “really like it if I could have a full body orgasm. You know like those girls did in the movie.”
Taken aback, I said, “I can have an orgasm... if that's what you're asking?”
He then went on to share with me that the one woman who truly knocked his socks off was a dancer from Vegas who had “full body orgasms.” I couldn't help myself and asked, “Were you dating Elizabeth Berkely?”
Really, though, I wanted to find out more about what he thought a female orgasm was like. He said, “You know, like in the movie tonight, it's mystical.” I let out possibly the biggest sigh of my life, possibly bigger than any orgasm moan I've ever made, and I fell back against my pillow.
For so many years we've had to convince the whole world that women could even have orgasms, and now men want to turn it into something so big it seems unachievable and even inhuman. I've had wonderful, crazy, rollicking orgasms, and I've had itty bitty, little quakes, and sometimes I haven't even had any, but I almost always have a good time no matter what. However, asking me to perform some kind of orgasm myth for you is really going to take all the joy out of our hook up for me. The point I'm trying to make is, each and every person's orgasm is like a little snowflake—unique and special; so please don't compare my climax face to another woman's. And, for God's sake, don't expect that when I come it's gonna be like the second coming and I'll unleash the life force that created the world.
I can barely work my coffee maker.
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