>No soup for you, Zack and Miri!

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Sep 102008
 

>In Kevin Smith’s ongoing struggle with the MPAA to get his latest film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, out into the theaters and in front of an audience, comes news that the agency has rejected the original poster for the movie. Featuring the title characters, each fully clothed, you may also notice at the bottom edge of the poster the somewhat humorous suggestion that each is getting oral, er, attention from the other. Pretty innocuous–and banned by the MPAA!

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Interestingly, as noted on CinemaBlend.com, the MPAA earlier approved very similar imagery for the Dane Cook-vehicle, Good Luck Chuck, for a poster that went even further–if you can call it that–featuring the actor more apparently in flagrante delitico.

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One might chalk up the discrepancy to mere bureaucratic inconsistency. Or, perhaps something more insidious, as it brings to mind contentions made in the documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, that the MPAA regularly applies far more rigorous standards when a depiction includes female sexual pleasure–and not just some guy boffing a pie.

Hypocrisy much? Meanwhile, first reports on the film, which just premiered in Toronto, can be found here!

>Oh, well, as long as it’s not titillating.

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Aug 072008
 

>Kevin Smith‘s upcoming latest, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, in which two friends attempt to overcome debt(!) by entering the adult film world, just had its rating reduced from an NC-17 to an R, after an appeal made by the director to the MPAA.

Acknowledging in an AP report that the more restrictive rating would have been “commercial suicide,”

Smith said the MPAA ratings board objected to two sex scenes involving co-stars Jason Mewes and Katie Morgan. After the movie’s initial NC-17 rating, Smith said he trimmed those scenes as far as he was willing to go but was unable to convince the board to lower the rating.

“They felt it was rather sexually graphic. My point is, it was comically graphic. All the sex in the movie with the exception of one scene is very cartoonish, very campy,” Smith said. “It wasn’t designed to titillate.”

The MPAA appeals board apparently agreed with Smith’s arguments, which he presented on Tuesday. No word yet when/if he’ll get an official thumbs-up on an early teaser for the film – see below – which the MPAA ordered yanked from its internet-only release back in June.