Young People Fucking (review)

Those of you who've been following my rants against Charles McVety and Bill C-10 would probably have heard of a movie with the unfortunate title Young People Fucking. More than any other film in recent history, this one movie has been trumped up by conservatives as a reason for tax money to be pulled from certain films made in this country -- even if they feel the government should be able to do that totally in secret. So you know I just had to make it my life's mission to see this so-called travesty for itself... if only I could find it.

My quest to watch and review this movie could probably make a decent comedy film of its own; it only played in one theatre in all of Hamilton, which stopped showing it the week I decided to go see it, the only rental store in my area doesn't carry it -- which is a little funny, considering that it does carry a movie called Wicked Sins, but anyway... -- and when I finally found it on YouTube it was taken down just as I got halfway through the movie. So unfortunately, this is really an incomplete video, and I'm going to have to base my opinions on what I did see, plus do what McVety has always refused to do: research other articles.

The premise is very simple: we follow four couples and one threesome one night, as they all knock boots. Along the way, they discover that sex is much more complicated than meets the eye, partly because no matter how casual or raunchy it may be, it's impossible to separate it from love. So right out of the gate we have some irony; religious conservatives are slagging a movie that actually promotes a message of love and connection, which you'd think they'd be happy to see.

The most common form of slander -- I mean, criticism -- by Mr. McVety about this movie is that it's supposedly pornographic. Admittedly the scenes are very suggestive, and once in a while there is a shot of coupling that leaves very little to the imagination... but that's quite rare. In the forty minutes or so that I caught, I saw maybe a half dozen or so breast shots, and one bare butt, all filmed pretty discreetly. Also, the sex scenes in question showed little more than continuous hip-grinding, rather than any explicit shots of penetration. According to every single review I have read -- both professional and amateur -- this is the extent of the sex in this movie. I kid you not.

It reminds me a little of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre; it has a reputation for being shockingly graphic bloodbath, but when you look at it it isn't very gory at all. Hell, I'm not even sure there's that much blood in it!

Let's break this down: if Young People Fucking is to be called porn for showing the odd boob and butt, then so are MASH, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, most horror movies, Animal House, Not Another Teen Movie, The Last Picture Show, Braveheart, at least four Highlander movies, much of Monty Python's handiwork, and this is just off the top of my head.

We could then go the route of the MPAA and go after hip thrusts; after all, they have a policy of banning movies if they have more than a certain number of humps at a time -- which I find a little strange, considering that some of the more degrading sex acts I can think of don't involve any hip thrusting. If people bumping pelvises makes this movie porn, then you can also say the same of The Shawshank Redemption, Scary Movie, Hellraiser, the original Halloween, American History X, at least three Highlander movies, The Last Picture Show... you get the idea. The point is, it's a really flimsy place to label anything as porn.

I don't dispute that there are movies out there that are so explicit in their sex scenes as to be interchangeable with hardcore porn -- the American-made Shortbus being a perfect example -- but as far as protecting the morals of the public, there would appear to be far better places to start than Young People Fucking. For example, Taking Lives was filmed in Canada, and features a sex scene that has very prolonged shots of Angelina Jolie getting her clothes ripped off and her pounded against her entire hotel room, showing the full monty along the way. But, since it was produced by an American company, it would have been exempt from the rules of Bill C-10. For that matter, what about the Saw movies, which are notorious for extreme levels of gore and relentless torture scenes? They're shot in Canada, but no, they're made by Americans too. If you really want to take the hypocrisy to its logical conclusion, one has to wonder what Charles McVety would have said, if The Passion of the Christ were financed with our tax dollars... I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that he'd call that exactly the kind of morally enriched entertainment we should be showing to all cross-bearing Canadian families.

The scary part of all of this is that this little scheme from the so-called Moral Majority almost worked -- it took a huge outcry to get the Senate to investigate Bill C-10, and even then the government wanted no part of it. In fact they, like McVety, have refused to see this movie. Do these sort of clandestine, fundamentalist oppressors really sound like the sort of people we should have running Canada? When a theocracy rears its head halfway around the world, the first reaction is to bomb the hell out of it, yet when the same type of thing happens at home, it seems we welcome it with open arms. And people wonder why I'm not patriotic. Enough said.