Day: October 5, 2004

In a piece honoring the recently deceased Janet Leigh, L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano says in today’s edition (10.5) that Leigh’s best films — Touch of Evil, Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate — amounted to “a dark trilogy, [in which she played] an icy, un-settling and alienated woman, a cynically tragic ur-feminist.” I’d leave room for a fourth character in this vein: the embittered ex-wife of Paul Newman’s down-at-the-heels shamus in Jack Smight’s Harper (1966), which boasted a finely-tuned script by William Goldman. The angry and wounded Susan Harper was surely a more substantial part than Leigh’s bizarre Candidate character, Eugenie Rose, who did little more than dab Frank Sinatra’s bruised face with a handkerchief and tell him how wonderful and adorable he was.

After nine submissions, the MPAA ratings board has finally given Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s political satire Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15) an R rating. The org had been threatening to label the Scott Rudin-produced film with an NC-17 rating over a simulated oral-sex scene between puppets. The board had presumably been adamant about this because any puppet movie will presumably attract a good number of minors, but of course it can’t be legally seen by minors with an R or NC-17 rating, so what are they on about? Do they think in this day and age that any 12 or 13 year-olds who manage to slip in regardless aren’t completely jaded about (and in some instances engaging in) sexual behavior of this sort?