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Last night I watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated, the documentary about the MPAA's film ratings system. It was an interesting film that raised a number of valid criticisms about the ratings system, but ultimately I think it was too intent on blaming the MPAA and completely missed a far deeper issue.

First the good bits.

It certainly seems strange to me that the people on the film ratings board are all anonymous. The MPAA says that this is to ensure that they are free to do their job without the threat of any kind of coercion, but if that's really a problem then surely it can be addressed in other ways. Having an anonymous group of people making these decisions really doesn't encourage people to believe that this process is fair and open.

The film also demonstrated that the ratings have been wildly inconsistent over the years. For example gay sexual scenes always seem to be rated more harshly than similar straight scenes. Or, perhaps that's not inconsistent. Perhaps that's completely consist, but bigoted - which would, of course, also be a problem. It's also the case that sexual content is often rated more harshly that violent content. For example, all of the extreme violence in American Psycho was fine, it was a relatively brief sex scene that had to be re-edited in order for the film to avoid an NC-17 rating.

All of this shows that there are problems with the way that the ratings system is administered. But in my opinion there are deeper issues that are completely outside of the MPAA's control which also need to be addressed. In many (probably most) cases I agree completely with the ratings board's decision to give a film an NC-17 rating. There was some spectacular naivety shown by some of the film-makers interviewed when they expressed surprise that the ratings board didn't want their films seen by people under the age of seventeen. Of course there are some things that should only be watched by adults. And remember that NC-17 is the only US film rating that has any kind of age restriction. It's not like the UK where you can give the film a 12 or 15 rating. Anyone in the US can see an R rated film as long as they are accompanied by an adult.

So the NC-17 rating shouldn't be avoided. It should be used more. There should be many films released each year that are given an NC-17 rating. But that doesn't happen currently because an NC-17 rating is seen as commercial death for a film. Many cinemas won't show NC-17 films, newpapers won't carry advertisements for them and some DVD rental companies refuse to stock them.

This is the fundamental problem. The NC-17 is avoided for commercial reasons when actually it should be embraced. There should be a market for NC-17 films. But something in the puritanical US society won't allow that. Adult films (and I don't just mean that in the sense of porn films) are doomed to commercial failure by the moral majority. Can't they see that this is counter-productive? If there was an acceptable market for NC-17 films then you wouldn't have so many people trying to push back the boundaries of what is acceptable in a R rated film.

There are definitely changes that need to be made to the way that the MPAA's ratings board works. But I don't agree that they need to rate fewer films as NC-17. If anything they should rate more films as NC-17. And the rest of the US film industry (in particular the distribution sections) need to promote NC-17 films more.

I saw The Golden Compass last night. In summary, I thought it was a pretty good adaptation. At times it moved a bit faster than I wanted it to, but that's only to be expected from a two-hour film based on such a complex book.

If you read on, there will be spoilers for both the book and the film. But if you're a friend of mine then I fully expect that you'll have read the trilogy years ago.

It started badly with a voice-over that gave more details about multiple universes, dust and the alethiometer than I thought was strictly necessary. The terms "alethiometer" and "golden compass" are used interchangeably in the film which I also found pretty annoying.

The next scene was also a disappointment. It was a scene that didn't appear in the book and served to introduce Lyra, Roger and the Gyptian children (particularly Billy Costa). Whilst Dakota Blue Richards impressed as Lyra, it's a shame that the other child actors weren't up to her standard. The only thing I found occasionally annoying about her performance was her "yokel" accent. But that's a fair translation of the book where I found Pullman's use of "ent" instead of "isn't" in Lyra's speech to be just as annoying.

After that the film manages to tell most of the story of the book. There are obviously some simplifications. For example, they don't mention the fact that the Panserbjørne can never be tricked, so Lyra's tricking of Iofur Raknison (renamed Ragnar Sturlusson to avoid confusion with Iorek Byrnison) isn't as impressive a feat as it should be. Other scenes were missed out completely. Two that I particularly missed were Mrs. Coulter's party (so we didn't get to meet Lord Boreal) and Iorek Byrnison cleaning his armour once it was retrieved.

At this point let me reiterate the spoiler warning from above.

The most surprising change was the ending. The film misses out the last part (one or two chapters I think) from the book. The film ends with the children freed from Bolvangar and Lyra heading north to meet Asriel. In the book, she meets Asriel, stuff happens and Asriel successfully opens a portal to another world which he and Lyra both go through. That's all missing from the film. I have no doubt that it will be included at the beginning of The Subtle Knife, but I was very surprised not to see it in this film.

On a more positive note, the special effects are very impressive. The daemons are a very important in these books so it was vital that they were portrayed realistically. And I think the film-makers achieved that. The daemons are very convincing, even when Pantalaimon is changing shape. It helps tremendously that they have such a strong cast of voice actors for the daemons. Even Asriel's daemon, Stelmaria, who speaks about two lines is played by Kristen Scott-Thomas.

And what about the portrayal of religion? How much of that was cut out? Well, there's really very little religion in Northern Lights and I didn't notice any of it missing. The Magisterium is still the Magisterium. The Authority is still the Authority and Asriel's theories about dust are still described as heresy. So, no, in my opinion there's nothing important removed there - because there was nothing that needed to be removed. It'll be interesting to see what they do with the other two books where the religion is far more explicit.

The story so far:

The people behind the films based on His Dark Materials decided to remove any direct references to god in order to avoid offending religious people.

However, the Catholic League decided that the cuts weren't deep enough and called for a boycott of the film.

Now we get this:

Christian groups such as the Catholic League have criticised the movie and charged the intentional removal of anti-religious themes as a ploy to encourage kids to read Pullman’s pro-atheism books.

So you remove the church from the films (wrongly, in my opinion) only to be accused of doing it to encourage more children to read the books. There's no way to win in this situation.

And anyway, since when was encouraging children to read such a bad idea? And if christianity is such convincing view of the universe why would you worry if children came into contact with alternative points of view? Sounds to me as though some people are worried that children exposed to alternative explanations of the universe might just see through the nonsense of religion and start thinking rationally.

Which would never do.

In December 2004 I bemoaned the fact that god was to be cut from the film versions of His Dark Materials. The first film will be released in a couple of months' time and I see (via MediaWatchWatch) that the cuts from The Golden Compass aren't deep enough the satisfy the Catholic League who have called for a boycott of the film. Apparently children who see the film could be encouraged to read the books and would therefore be introduced to the full force of Philip Pullman's dangerous atheism.

Perhaps we should have a campaign to donate copies of the books to local Catholic churches.

Update: More from the Observer and the National Secular Society (I didn't mention that I'd joined the NSS, did I?). I'm particularly appalled by the quotation from Nicole Kidman:

I was raised Catholic, the Catholic Church is part of my essence ... I wouldn't be able to do this film if I thought it were at all anti-Catholic.

Sky have stitched up Virgin Media customers again.

They've just reorganised all of their film channels. Instead of getting Sky Movies 1 to 9 and Sky Cinema 1 and 2 we now get a load of themed film channels - Sky Classics, Sky Premiere, Sky Horror, etc.

Stitch-up number one: There are fewer channels now than there were before the reorganisation.

Stitch-up number two: These new channels all seem to have shorter broadcasting hours than the old channels.

Whilst I think it's a bit rude of Sky to effectively remove content like that without dropping prices (and rude of Virgin Media to implement those changes without even letting their customers know), I realise that Sky was spreading the decent films rather thinly across its channels and most of the films shown on the channels (particularly during the day) were complete rubbish.

So those changes were disappointing, but they weren't what made me decide to cancel my Sky film channels subscription. No, that decision was made yesterday when I was flicking through the new channels.

Stitch-up number three: The new channels, with the single exception of Sky Family[1] are PIN-protected. You can't watch the films on the channel without entering your PIN. Sky say that this is because these channels potentially show 15 and 18 rated films before the watershed. Which makes a kind of sense. But whilst my digital video recorder is capable of changing channels on the cable box, it can't enter my PIN. So I can no longer set the DVR to record films when I'm not there. In fact, thinking about it, I think the films on a PIN-protected channel are broadcast in the interactive services part of the channel so it's likely that they can't be recorded at all. I bet that the same is true if I get a V+ box. Chances are that it's only a Sky+ recorder that stands a chance of getting round these restrictions.

So I can no longer record films on Sky's film channels. And 90% of my use of these channels is recording films to watch later. So the channels become almost useless to me.

I called Virgin Media this morning to remove the film channels from my subscription. This saves me almost £20 a month which can be spent in my local DVD rental shop or on a Love Film subscription.

I hope that Virgin weren't making much on those channels and that most of the loss in income is passed directly on to Sky.

[1] And guess how keen I am to watch most of the films there

I watched Jesus Camp yesterday. What a frightening film that is. It's like watching child abuse. No, I take that back. It is watching child abuse.

You should all watch it. It will open your eyes to some of the atrocities carried out by the evangelical christians in the US.

How many films have you seen?

That's not a question I've ever pondered before. But it came up in conversation earlier this week when a friend was telling me about Listal. A new web site that he had been playing with.

Listal is aimed at the High Fidelity geek audience. It's a web site for making lists. My friend had been making a list of all of the films he had seen and had very quickly found himself with a list of over 600 films.

That sounded in the right sort of area to me. If we assume that I watch on average one new film a week and that I've been doing that for twenty years or so then I'll have seen about a thousand films. But how many of them can I remember?

So I joined up and over the last few days I've been building my own list of films that I've seen. It actually turns out to be a) pretty easy and b) very interesting. I've also got to over 600 films (is there some psychological limit there - humans find it easy to remember the titles of 600 films?) and with such a large data set interesting patterns emerge. You can find the actor you've seen most often (Ian Holm apparently) and the director whose films you've seen most of (Spielberg - which I found quite surprising).

So feel free to laugh at my taste in films. But why not build your own list and let me laugh at yours in exchange.

Oh, and if I've mentioned seeing any films that aren't yet on my list then please let me know.

I've just noticed that the Odeon web site has had a major redesign and now appears to work without any problems in Firefox. When did that happen?

Shock Treatment has been released on DVD. If you're not aware of the significance of this event then you're not as big a Rocky Horror fan as you like to think you are.

There's also the obligatory collectors edition with stupid amounts of extra stuff.

Nice review of The Da Vinci Code on the BBC blog network.

Two categories of people will probably be disappointed by the film: those who have read the book and those who have been looking forward to the movie.

For all its flaws, the book is vastly better than the film. And I say that as one who felt sullied after reading the book, which is art history for those who've never been to an art gallery, theology for those who've never read the Bible, and literature for those who've rarely been to a library.

I'm undecided as to whether or not I'll go and see the film. On one hand, it's based on one of the worst books that I've ever read and nothing that I've seen about the film makes me think that the film will be any better. And I don't want to give any more money to that illiterate, Dan Brown. But on the other hand, I really feel that I should support something that annoys so many christians so much.

To be honest, I'm disappointed by the furore it has created. All of the ideas in it that annoy the christians have been circulating for hundreds of years. It's almost twenty-five years since they were first brought to public attention in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and I really can't believe that there's anyone who isn't aware of the theories given the amount of press that Brown's excreable volume has had over the last few years. So why are the christians so upset?

I think they're protesting too much. I know that most of the ideas in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail have long since been disproven, but the disproportionate response by the church makes me think that there's something in the book that they don't want people to think about too much.

Or perhaps they just realise that if people start looking at the bible with a more critical eye, then it'll soon become obvious how much of it is complete nonsense.