Not much in this documentary would be new for anyone who’s paid attention, over the years, to the MPAA ratings board’s particular form of sickness: a little sex is worse than a lot of violence; women enjoying sex is worse than women being forced to have sex; gay sex is worse than straight sex. “Worse” is a slightly unfair term, since the first defense any MPAA bigwig raises to any criticism is that they aren’t censors– just regular folks advising parents. In theory the ratings board should be of no interest to an adult picking a movie to watch him- or herself, and so no value judgment is implied.

Filmmaker Kirby Dick fortunately doesn’t spend long belaboring how stupid this argument is. If most chains won’t exhibit your movie, Wal-Mart won’t sell it, and Blockbuster won’t rent it, then large segments of American society will never know it existed. Even so, you get the feeling the many filmmakers interviewed in This Film Is Not Yet Rated would accept the system if it were sane, or at least fair. It is not.

So we already knew how bad things were, but the MPAA’s amazing lack of integrity will still piss you off if you watch this. What little information the organization gives the public about the members of their ratings board (that they are the parents of children under 17 and serve fixed terms on the board) turns out to be flatly untrue. Longtime MPAA head Jack Valenti is depicted as incapable of speaking sincerely about anything*. And Kirby Dick can do some things that print articles can’t, like actually showing the scenes which the MPAA star chamber objects to alongside near-identical scenes from other movies that got lower ratings.

In the end Dick doesn’t have much of an argument to make; he puts information in front of the viewer and treats the conclusions as obvious. You might call it preaching to the choir, but I think he’s uniquely positioned to justify that as a documentary strategy. The fact that the ratings board is completely dependent on lies and obscurity to maintain their position of power speaks as poorly of them as anything else you could say. If you leave This Film wanting to punch Jack Valenti (which, his advanced age and the potential hypocrisy of doing so notwithstanding, you will), spare a thought for the people who ought to see it but will never hear its name except in ads for other movies.

* And Dick leaves out many unrelated obnoxious things Valenti has famously said, like his statement 24 years ago that the VCR was to his industry “as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone” and his like-minded recent comparison of file-sharers to terrorists.

“Hey guys, is irony dead?”

“Why?”

“I’m just wondering if we can call a song on the new album ‘Whoo! Alright– Yeah… Uh Huh’ or not.”

“How is that ironic?”

“… I guess that’s a ‘yes’.”

Not semiotically confusing, just kind of blank– I’m not sure what ‘dog problems’ are, or what ‘format’ the band’s name refers to. They turn out to be an awesomely contemporary pop-rock unit, which is to say, nothing is experimental or unfamiliar, but Fonzie might be confused. The whininess that denotes emo sincerity is so abstract now that it doesn’t sound whiny itself; you’ll just notice, if you try to imitate singer Nate Ruess, that your voice is coming from all the wrong places in your head.

It sounds so nice, in fact, that I was reluctant to realize how much the songs differ in quality. “Time Bomb” is the kind of song you hear once and then hum for days; most of the album’s second half is the kind of thing you mistakenly thing you weren’t paying attention to, because by the time it ends you’ve forgotten what record it is. The Format’s first album, Interventions And Lullabies, has the same problem. And that’s too bad, because, you know, I’m not usually too susceptible to The Shins and their inheritors, while these guys have SOME amazing songs, plus a lively online presence and lots of EPs, demos, etc. Given half an excuse, I could become a very serious fan. I’d say Dog Problems amounts to maybe 40% of an excuse.

For several months, I’ve had these music posts going up on Livejournal under the name “noise_floor”. Bright Eyes now have a rarities collection called Noise Floor coming out. Rats! After all the time I spent trying to come up with a music-related phrase that wasn’t a reference to anyone in particular…