The Shade Between BBFC Insight.

Derek Cianfrance, the director of the sobering romantic drama Blue Valentine as well as the ambitious but ultimately disappointing The Place Beyond the Pines, both starring Ryan Gosling, has another film out this year, not starring Ryan Gosling. The film in question has a clunky title to rival its predecessor: The Light Between Oceans.

This film is already out in the States but is not released here until November, although it has been given a BBFC rating. It is rated 12A, unsurprisingly, given it got a PG-13 in the States (and as you should know by now, ~90% of PG-13s align to 12As here, and if they don’t, I usually write a blog discussing/questioning why).

The short insight made me cackle, as, if I didn’t know better, I would think the BBFC were throwing shade at the movie’s male and female leads:

The film revolves around a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who discover a baby washed up on the shore. Having grappled with conception and several heartbreaking miscarriages, they decide to raise the baby as their own. The protagonists are played by Michael Fassbender and stealer of Rooney Mara’s Oscar this year Alicia Vikander, who are a couple in real life.

However, the more cynical of moviegoers don’t buy this, and think that their relationship is a Weinstein Company-manufactured showmance, created for the PR of The Light Between Oceans; a belief given further fuel during the BAFTA ceremony this year, when the Kiss Cam centred on them and they refused to smooch. One person believes this showmance theory so much they even have a Tumblr account about it.

I’m undecided about the veracity of the claims on that Tumblr account, and frankly, celebrities’ love lives are none of my goddamn business anyway. But I was tickled by the BBFC insight, and immediately wondered if the BBFC were in their own way, giving a veiled message about how much they bought into the Fassbender/Vikander relationship. 

As if describing their sex life as ‘infrequent’ wasn’t bad enough… ‘moderate’, too. Dayum.

(Or, you know, they were just genuinely describing the content of the film and I could be reading too much into three words and need to stop assuming everyone is as Shady McGrady as I am.)

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In other sort of BBFC-related news, when my brother turned 18 this year, I couldn’t resist using it as an excuse to a) give a shoutout to my favourite film certification board and b) plug three excellent films that I'm always hollering at him to watch in order to enrich our level of repartee and inside jokes at others' expense.

Channel 4 pulled a blinder on Sunday night, screening The Wolf of Wall Street, so I forced Tom to watch it, which is good because for the sake of completeness, we’ve watched practically all the Jonah Hill movies together now (minus True Story, but I have zero interest in that film; it looks like a prolonged, failed, Oscar beg on his and James Franco’s part and no one got any time for that. It was gruelling enough having to sit through Jonah’s WoWS co-star beg for his Oscar).

Tom, being the good man that he is, said he enjoyed it a lot, especially given that he’d caught an outdoor screening The Big Short in London last week and found it dry A F. I’m glad his mathematical prowess translates to being able to determine the wheat from the chaff in terms of films about finance, too.

As I’ve said before, several of the clown dude-bros who I’ve had the serious misfortune of going on dates with fancy themselves a kind of Leo in WoWS-type character, so it was funny to watch the film with Tom and delve into the psyche of these clowns (or so they wish).

Next up from that Facebook status, I’ll be bullying my brother into watching Gone Girl, so he can understand the psyche of the woman these clowns have chosen to go on a date with. 

(or so I wish).