Snacking with Adel

(First published 0n 09/02/2009 2:18 AM; http://abs-cbnnews.com)

When I wrote about Avatar last week, I got a few comments chiding me for writing a kinda/sorta movie review when this column is supposedly for consumer issues. Worse yet, it wasn’t even a review for a real movie, it was a review of a preview for a few minutes of something that is still in production.

Why, a movie isn’t a consumer product anymore? Everything is, these days. I won’t even get into the argument that the Avatar preview was a glimpse into the direction that movies are heading, which is a very important point. Products don’t have to be material things like canned food or cosmetics; they can well be novels, plays, TV shows and movies. I’m actually doing research for a consumer review of our presidentiables, which you’ll probably get to read sometime in November when they actually file for candidacy and I get a more definite product line-up.

That said, at the risk of being perceived as an entertainment column, I’m doing another movie-related thing today. Not exactly a review, but a criticism of certain practices involving film releases in this country. (I would love to get into a full-blown discussion of ratings and censorship, but this space would hardly be adequate for something like that.)

I speak about the very provocative and intense District 9, a science-fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson that manages to criticize and skewer everything that’s wrong with us. Basically the movie is about how humans deal with a refugee flood of aliens derogatorily called “prawns.” It talks of discrimination, apartheid, poverty and squalor, avarice, corporate greed, prostitution, crime, gun control, weapon production, immorality, perversion and human atrocities, and features wholesale murder and extreme scenes of butchery and violence.

Which the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, in its infinite wisdom, ratesPG-13 and banners in print ads that it’s been released without cuts. And then cuts out scenes anyway. The wrong ones.

The Board of Censors’—I mean, the MTRCB’s— habit of cutting out ‘objectionable’ scenes when they should just be rating the movie is patently ridiculous, more so when you consider the simple logic that they if already cut the bad stuff out, why even rate it for adults anymore? It’s like making non-alcoholic beer and still saying that only people over 18 can drink it.

This whole District 9 debacle is so wrong on so many levels, it’s dizzying.

It’s a great film, but I won’t get into a synopsis of the story. If you haven’t seen it yet, please, just put the laptop to sleep, skip work and go watch the movie, and then come back to this page. You’ll thank me for it. Without exaggeration, it’s an excellent movie, and probably one of the best things you’ll see this year. Despite it being a sci fi adventure with elements of Schindler’s List, Iron Man, Independence Day, Aliens, and The Fly, it’s a thought-provoking drama with important, relevant ideas about life, xenophobia and the nature of humans.

Here’s how it started: a few days before it opened, a local blogger wrote that the local release of District 9 was butchered by the MTRCB to keep the ratings at PG-13. Word got around, and I, for one, got discouraged to see it. Then, later in the week, I noticed the ad in the newspaper for District 9 proclaimed it was “PG-13 WITHOUT CUTS”, presumably to counter the negative talk that it had been butchered beyond comprehension and wasn’t worth seeing anymore.

Really? So which was it? Cut, or uncut?

Having given up trying to catch it on the big screen, I’d gone ahead and seen an online copy, and found the violence there no more objectionable than your typical National Artist–level massacre epic, certainly less than the gore-porn that routinely escapes MTRCB scissors like Hostel, Saw and any number of modern Hollywood horror movies. Left alone, District 9 was a provocative, exciting film. If they had cut fundamental and integral scenes, then its premise, concept and filmic integrity was likely compromised and it had become an emasculated, empty mess of a movie.

So, curious about the ad’s claim, I went and caught it on a big screen over the long weekend. With me in the theater were a number of toddlers and young children with their parents, excited to see this new sci-fi movie.

I discovered that, contrary to the newspaper advertisement, it was cut. The ad was a bare-faced lie.

But what did they cut? Did they remove youngster-warping scenes of violence, cruelty and butchery? Morally-compromising scenes of injustice , persecution and crude racial-discrimination metaphors substituting prawns for African-Americans? Psychologically-devastating scenes of poverty and squalor? Inter-species sexual abuse and prostitution?

Nope. The MTRCB left those scenes alone for parents to guide their 13-year-old-and-below kids over. As far as I could tell, what they did cut were a few fleeting seconds of a some mercenaries being blown to bloody bits by alien weapons. Simple blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bang-and-bloody-spray stuff. Nothing you don’t get to see everyday on cable TV at home. That was it.

God help them, they don’t even know what to censor; they can’t even do their misguided job right.

On the one hand, I am grateful that the MTRCB’s meddling was so superficial, shallow and predictable that the film survived nearly intact and still made complete sense.

On the other hand, it was still a bit strong to just be PG-13; should’ve been an R. If they had meant to remove the bloody bits for the sake of the kids and the box office, I’m puzzled they left alone a great number of overtly violent scenes—like main baddie Col. Venter being literally dismembered by a mob of prawns, or Nigerian warlord Obesandjo getting his head blown off spectacularly by the mecha suit. They didn’t even touch the discussion of hero Wikus Van Der Merwe getting infected by having sex with prawns or trim the scenes showing the atrocities committed by human scientists experimenting on the prawns. I’m sure the kids had lots of questions to ask their parents after the movie.

You gotta hand it to the MTRCB. They rate the movie wrong, leave the strong adult bits in and cut out inconsequential stuff, then allow children into the theater. And then they lie about not cutting the movie. Jeez. They can’t even make mistakes right. Way to go, guys.