Protecting Our Values: After pressure from the paternalist Liberal Government, Australia's film censors have banned Baise-Moi, overturning the R rating previously granted. More than 50,000 people have seen the film while it was legal; the ban is believed to be the work of a board stacked with religious conservatives and political appointees, and advice is being taken on how to challenge it.

(Wonder what they'll do next; how about bringing back the ban on the importation of electric guitars, just like in the hallowed Menzies Era, in case this rock'n'roll thing corrupts the morals of our youth.)

I saw Baise-Moi last week. I'm still not sure whether it's a work raising serious questions or an adolescent tantrum of sensationalist violence (more likely, it's somewhere in between; the question is whether the crux of its difference from all the by-the-numbers post-Tarantino films is in its message or in the fact that they have actual sex in it). I don't think it should be banned though.

Posted by: diane | http:// | Sun May 12 21:29:02 2002

I didn't see the film myself (wasn't up to watching graphic pornography), but I thought this fellow's comments on IMBd were interesting:

Ksael Agnulraon (ksaelagnulraon@hotmail.com) Adelaide, Australia Date: 3 May 2002 Summary: Not pleasant

However, in a similar genre, I did see the Belgian film "S." and Michael Winterbottom's "Butterfly Kiss" and thought they were quite good (very graphic, sacrilegious but cathartic, in a way). I would not recommend them to the average viewer, though.

Posted by: Toby | http://www.adbusters.org/ | Mon May 13 14:55:50 2002

Wish they would ban the really insidious shit like "Black Hawk Down" (or practically anything from south of the Canadian border).

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Mon May 13 16:11:48 2002

But that's *patriotic*. If anything along those lines, they'd put aside their free-market ideology (and we all know how real "free markets" are) to subsidise a local Patriotic Thriller industry to make an all-Australian variant of the Bruckheimer-founded genre .

Oh well, if Crikey is right and we get housing prices falling, the coalition will be out on their arses like the UK Tories. And I'll get to feel smug rather than under-achieving for not having a mortgage.

Want to say something? Do so here.

Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image on the right in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Remember my details.

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.