Internet

Banning the Human Centipede II

A day or two ago, the UK’s national organisation of stopping-you-watching-things, the BBFC, announced that they had rejected The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) as a work too depraved to be released in the UK, a film that couldn’t be salvaged by any measure of cuts, a story that would corrupt and damage our all-too-fragile sensibilities.

In one word, this is ridiculous.

To explain why, I’m using this post to write out three of the reasons I believe this. Namely, that 1) this move reveals awkward things about what we do and don’t accept, 2) that the evidence upon which we base the ‘dangers’ of watching bad things is pretty slim and 3) that censorship simply doesn’t work.

The death of cinema?

So I’ve been meaning to write this for a few days now. Shame it’s taken me so long…

As reported in the Guardian and many other places on Sunday, several big-name directors have joined the cinema industry in attacking movie-industry plans to shorten the amount of time between the cinema debut of a film and its home availability, by making video-on-demand (that’s streaming) films available as little (?) as two months after the film’s release.