The Weekend Cometh

I'm on a short vacation this weekend, so updates may be a little bit sparse, but in the meantime, I've got another two-fer Friday today with articles in both National Review Online and The Washington Times.

In The Washington Times, I take on "This Film is Not Yet Rated," an edgy (and, not surprisingly, unrated) documentary that targets the secrecy and inconsistencies of the ratings board. But I'm not convinced.

So just how does the ratings system work? That's the question that director Kirby Dick attempts to answer in his new documentary, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated." Purported to be a muckraking expose about the shadowy workings of the unduly secretive MPAA ratings board, it teases out a few inconsistencies and imperfections in the way films are rated, but it does not make nearly as powerful a case as its filmmakers think. And, quite unintentionally, it reminds viewers -- with its barrages of sexually explicit imagery -- why the major movie studios instituted a ratings system to begin with.

At NRO, I've got a piece on the latest Zach Braff romantic mope flick, The Last Kiss. It's not always a good movie, but it may have some interest to those (including me) in the urban, twentysomething demographic.

The Last Kiss is an occasionally interesting, often irritating dissection of the shallow, self-serving relationships of a group that has been labeled "indie yuppies": the blandly hip, mostly urban twenty-somethings who have wholly bought in to the ploy of finding individual identity in lifestyle consumerism. Shot with the blasé entitlement of a Volkswagon commercial, it's a movie about a generation that bought their pre-fab personalities at the mall and ordered their life goals from the Internet, yet still wonders why everything seems so dull and predictable. And it's about the frictions that occur when they discover that, unlike those trendy pre-faded jeans and earth-tone sweaters, human relations cannot be loved and worn for a season, then carelessly tossed away.