Total Recall: NC-17 Movies
With Shame hitting theaters, we take a look at some of the films that were slapped with the MPAA's most notorious rating.
For almost as long as we've had movies, we've had a culture war to go along with them -- an ongoing struggle between filmmakers who want to challenge, provoke, or simply tell an honest story, and audience members/lawmakers who want to protect viewers with more delicate sensibilities. To help concerned filmgoers navigate the landscape (and improve upon the outdated Hays Code), Hollywood implemented a voluntary ratings system in the late 1960s, and for the most part, it's done its job -- although it certainly hasn't been without its detractors. The "X" designation, created as a catchall category for movies with adult content, has proven particularly problematic; despite the occasional release of "real" X-rated films (such as Midnight Cowboy, Fritz the Cat, and Last Tango in Paris), the rating quickly became shorthand for pornography.
In order to help differentiate between high art and cheap thrills, the MPAA introduced the NC-17 in 1990, and although it hasn't done anything to improve the box office prospects of films receiving the rating, it has given an alternative to filmmakers who want to create challenging and/or provocative movies for grown-ups without dealing with the "rated X" stigma. With Steve McQueen's Shame heading for limited release this weekend (and already courting controversy), we decided now would be the perfect time to pay tribute to the NC-17. Get ready for plenty of skin, violence, and broken taboos -- and bring your ID, because it's time for an adults-only Total Recall!
Bad Education
88%
If there is such a thing as your average drama about the aftereffects of a Catholic priest molesting young boys, Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education isn't it. Using the shame and betrayal of the Church scandal as a jumping-off point, Education spirals into layers of colorful, typically Almodóvarian melodrama, including a film-within-a-film, multiple cases of hidden identity, blurred gender lines, and drug use. It was all too much for the MPAA, but just enough for critics like the AV Club's Scott Tobias, who wrote, "In accounting for Almodóvar's identity as an artist and a man, Bad Education comes together like a bold and far-reaching summation of his career to date."
Bad Lieutenant
77%
Long before Nicolas Cage started hallucinating iguanas in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant "rethought," Harvey Keitel took filmgoers into the darkest depths of man's soul with the 1992 original. Directed by Abel Ferrara, Bad Lieutenant earned its NC-17 with 96 minutes of generally depraved behavior (not to mention full-frontal nudity from both sexes), but there was real meaning to the movie's madness -- not to mention a bravura performance from its star, who inspired Empire's Clark Collis to write, "Keitel is onscreen for pretty much the entire movie and clearly relishes the opportunity of playing someone not so much teetering on the abyss as leaping off with a grand piano manacled to each ankle."
Crash
58%
He's explored a handful of different genres, from period pieces to outright horror flicks, but along the way, director David Cronenberg has remained resolutely provocative -- which made him a natural fit to adapt Crash, J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel about an emotionally bankrupt film producer (James Spader) who discovers new purpose (and a rather creepy fetish) after embarking on an affair with the widow (Holly Hunter) of a man he kills in a head-on car crash. Exploring the world of car crash porn with his singularly detached precision, Cronenberg raised a considerable ruckus with the film at Cannes -- where it won a prize for "originality, daring and audacity" despite some jury members' very vocal disapproval -- and at the studio level, where Fine Line owner Ted Turner fought to keep it out of U.S. theaters. It also divided critics, although a number of top scribes were able to find beauty in the high-speed wreckage -- including Roger Ebert, who observed, "It's about the human mind, about the way we grow enslaved by the particular things that turn us on, and forgive ourselves our trespasses."
The Dreamers
60%
Sometimes, filmmakers venture into NC-17 territory in order to stay true to their stories by offering unflinchingly honest depictions of adult behavior. And sometimes -- as in the case of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers -- they push the ratings envelope simply on account of what the MPAA likes to call "nudity and sexual content." The tale of an American exchange student (Michael Pitt) who comes to Paris and falls in with a disconcertingly close pair of siblings (Eva Green and Louis Garrel), Dreamers totters between a tribute to cinephilia, a statement on the French political unrest of the late 1960s, and an excuse for lots of weird sexual tension -- a tricky blend that was appreciated by critics like Kimberley Jones of the Austin Chronicle, who wrote, "The Dreamers is infused with the same kind of wistful melancholy that made the French New Wave films so winning, and it's all gorgeous to look at."
Henry & June
73%
The original NC-17 film, Philip Kaufman's Henry & June underscored the need for some sort of distinction between bawdy pornographic fare and films that braved the line between safe commercialism and challenging art. Starring Fred Ward as Henry Miller, Uma Thurman as his wife June, and Maria de Medeiros as Anaďs Nin, the movie -- based on Nin's memoir of the same name -- details the pan-sexual love triangle between the trio. Tagged with the NC-17 rating for some relatively mild stuff (including a shot of a famously explicit postcard), it delivered thoughtful subtext along with prurient thrills; as Owen Gleiberman wrote for Entertainment Weekly, "After many fits and starts, Henry & June becomes another feminist-awakening movie -- the story of a lesbian attraction that, for Anaďs, is really a dawning of the self."
creighton satterfield
I hope Shame will change the stigma on the rating. A few of these are classics, especially Man Bites Dog.
Nov 30 - 03:35 PM
Johan Sigg
Word to that
Dec 1 - 11:05 AM
Cold Pillow
How about American Beauty?
Dec 1 - 06:17 PM
dethburger hates Flixster
Not NC-17
Dec 1 - 06:51 PM
KeepsItReal .
...and Orgasmo. That movie was the greatest.
Dec 5 - 02:05 PM
Val Mordas
In a Hollywood that is reluctant to even let a film be rated 'R' in some cases, I really doubt you'll see a plethora of NC-17 films released anytime soon.
Dec 6 - 04:06 PM