The Big Deal About Nothing

I've been hearing a lot of buzz about this movie Captivity, which came out today. Not the good "Gotta See It!" kind of buzz; it's the bad "This is the most evil movie ever made!" kind of buzz.

It all started earlier in the year when a billboard advertising the movie (pictured at the top of this post) appeared in New York and Los Angeles. Apparently, due to a snafu between Lionsgate (the movie's distributor) and After Dark (the movie's producer), these unapproved billboards were displayed for the public to see. Well, a bunch of soccer moms and weak stomached do-gooders, which L.A. and New York happen to be lousy with, didn't like them. They thought it glorified the torture of women and a genre of movies that have been lovingly called "Torture-Porn." (I prefer the term "Gore-Porn," or "Gorno," for short.)

So, they started a grass roots campaign to get the movie unrated. Apparently, if a movie's ad materials are not approved by the MPAA, it may lose its privilege of being rated. And, it worked. The MPAA withheld from rating the movie until the last minute and forced the film to have all of its advertising approved. This whole mess caused the movie to have its release date pushed back two months. It's a lot of crap for a movie to go through due to a poster.

With this much scorn heaped upon a movie, I think you know that I'm going to see it. And I did.

The verdict? Those idiots made a lot of misplaced stink about a movie that is pretty lame, in terms of gorno. I just watched Saw 3 the other day, and it's a thousand times more sadistic than Captivity, and I don't remember anyone throwing a tantrum over that movie or the three pulled teeth on a wire (as in Saw 3; get it?) that appear on its poster.

And, speaking of posters, I've seen a lot worse that no one has seemed to care about. The original teaser posters for Saw featured assorted severed limbs.
There was a teaser poster for Hostel 2 with a nude Bijou Philips holding her own decapitated head. No one picketing the MPAA on those. (Both are readily available on eBay, as well.)

It just goes to show you that it takes a village to keep our children from seeing inappropriate material. It would be better if the village wasn't full of idiots, but, well, at least they tried.

By the way, on an unrelated note, before Captivity was a trailer for a remake of 3:10 to Yuma. They're very near the bottom of the remake barrel now.