Young People Fucking, Part 2!

Well, I'm actually a bit surprised. You all would know by now, I've been following the controversy around the movie Young People Fucking quite closely, and with a certain amount of sarcasm. This was helped by the fact that a while ago, I was able to find it on YouTube and started watching it, but then it got pulled. I saw enough to have a general idea of what it was like, so between that and reading additional reviews I said in a previous episode that it was really overrated as far as filth goes. Well, I finally saw it in full a few days ago -- it turns out that it just now came out on DVD... and it turns out I may have to eat some words.

Now, I didn't see much more in the second half than I did the first half, as far as anything racy goes. That being said, I'll say that chalking up the nudity to "just a couple of boobs and butts" was over simplifying it, there was actually quite a bit of nudity as the movie went on. I'm not terribly bothered by that, but since it could throw some people I should point that out. Also, while the action still isn't super explicit, the staging does get more revealing than I indicated the first time around. I honestly apologize for that.

What this comes down to is the really loaded question surrounding the movie -- is it porn? Well in the hardcore sense, definitely not. As I've said before, there are much more deserving candidates than this in the indie film category. But, by definition you can make a decent argument for it being a kind of softcore. I'll get to that in more detail later.

That being said, to say that movies like this contribute to the so-called moral decay of society is really stretching it. This sort of movie is definitely not marketed to kids, and to be honest it's so obscure outside of cultural circles that I wouldn't be surprised if most people haven't even heard of it. For that matter, it's not the sort of movie that places like Blockbuster just put out front for everyone to see -- in fact, for a while I was convinced that it didn't really carry it, and there was some misprint in the new releases. It was actually buried in a pretty odd place. In other words, if parents actually do their jobs and keep their kids away from this stuff, both by talking about it with them and by actually blocking them from it where necessary, the kids would be fine. To be blunt, it isn't fair to try to censor filmmakers just because some parents are asleep at the switch.

Anyway, the problem with basing a very important public policy on a movie like this is that it's not only wide open to abuse -- as Charles McVety's disturbing attitude towards the harmless Breakfast with Scot makes very clear -- but there definitely needs to be clear, multi-lateral grounds for labelling any movie as obscene. Now, I very rarely agree with the Family Action Coalition on ANYTHING, but as I've said before Young People Fucking *may* indeed qualify as a kind of mild pornography. In any event, the smart thing to do would be to have multiple people in the government review this kind of material... and preferably people who don't have some sort of ax to grind, or a few marbles missing. I can't emphasize that last part enough, not only because of the aforementioned Mr. McVety, but I can honestly remember a Christian group in the U.S. that thought Attack of the Clones was sexually explicit, because Natalie Portman wore a shoulder less dress a couple of scenes. I'm completely serious. People that neurotic about the human body make me wonder if they shower, bathe, and go swimming with their eyes closed.

The really silly part about this was how overblown it got. What any religious group trying to block questionable media never quite seem to realize is that the more you preach against something, the more it becomes known, and the more people get curious about it. In other words, whether this movie was obscene or not, McVety gave it all the free publicity it ever needed, especially by refusing to see the thing in full, and going so far as to flat out lie about it having things like an orgy in it. So if the filmmakers would have been frugal enough to make it as a no-budget movie -- which, take it from someone who's done that, would be easy as pie -- they wouldn't have needed the tax credit in the first place! The ad royalties alone would have made them their money back. But I digress... The point is, censorship is a really dangerous thing for the government to get into, and if it ever does it had better make damn sure it knows what it's talking about. Enough said.