8 Things I Learned from the 2018 BBFC Annual Report

This blog is rated 15 for references to violence, sexual violence, and bragging from the author.

The 2018 BBFC Annual Report actually came out a bit earlier this year than we're used to; last year's report dropped on July 19th, whereas 2018's one came almost two month's earlier. However, so switched on are my BBFC-senses that I seemed to anticipate this, as I wrote my prediction blog a few weeks ago!

So, as per tradition for the past three years (2015 et 2016 et 2017), here were some notable points I took when devouring the report!

01. Emma knows her BBFC

This was also one of my takeaways from last year's report, and I'm aware it's a bit self-aggrandising to bring it up again, but it's not like me to self-promote, now is it? 😏

In my anticipation blog, I correctly called that Red Sparrow would be the most complained-about film of 2018, followed by Peter Rabbit, Show Dogs, A Northern Soul and Ready Player One. I even correctly predicted that Love, Simon's trailer would get the BBFC complaints.

The Consistency Act

This blog is rated 15 for infrequent strong sex references.

The new Fionn Whitehead film, The Children Act, is one of those curious cases where the film is rated 12A in Britain and Ireland, yet got an R in America.

The Death of Specificity

This blog is rated 15 for infrequent very strong language and strong sex references.

The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s razor-sharp historical satire, explores the power struggles that unfold immediately after Joseph Stalin dies from a stroke, with hilarious consequences.

10 Lessons Learned from the 2017 BBFC Annual Report

I’ve waited long and hard, but Christmas for Emma has arrived! The BBFC Annual Report for 2017 dropped today, and here are the ten main takeaways I got from consuming it!

01. Emma knows her BBFC

Just as I’d predicted in my anticipation blog, the film which got the most complaints to the BBFC last year was Logan. 

Battle of the Sex Scenes

This blog is rated 12A for moderate sex references.

Despite the BBFC constantly palming me off with less-than-satisfactory templated e-mails of little substance whenever I pose them a query, I always seem to come back for more.

Perhaps this is because my brain is so film classification-geared, that I’m hungry to have movie discourse of any kind, and the BBFC did act on my Call Me by Your Name e-mail earlier this year, showing that they are receptive to suggestions, once in a blue moon.

My most recent e-mail to them was about Battle of the Sexes, rated 12A for infrequent moderate sex. The oh-so-informative extended insight reads:

In one scene, two women have sex; however, there is no strong detail.

A rude gesture at the MCU

This blog is rated 12A for implied strong language and references to violence and torture.

Those with a passing interest in British film certification will have noticed that they’ve recently adopted a new turn of phrase as part of their catalogue of film ratings reasons: ‘rude gesture’.

It’s been flagged for several films, including Pacific Rim Uprising, Rampage and Walk with Me. The former two are 12A and the latter is a PG, which suggests to me the BBFC can’t quite decide if using the middle finger is a 12A or PG-rated offence.

Love, Emma

This is a BBFC-ccentric blog. In the great tradition of the BBFC, I will now preface articles on film ratings with a film rating (how meta, eh?).

This entry would be rated 12A for references to murder, sexual threat, racist behaviour and snide digs at certain druggie actresses.

-- 

Midnight Sun, a film which I have no interest in seeing (it stars that meth-head Bella Thorne (for future reference, just so you know, whenever I refer to ‘Meth-head’, I’m talking about Bella Thorne, and ‘Cokehead’ is Cara Delevingne), recently got handed a rather interesting BBFC insight.

It is rated 12A purely for ‘underage drinking’.

The extended insight reads:

There are scenes glamorising alcohol use in which teenagers, including some who are underage, attend a party where they play drinking games and do shots.

Seems a pretty draconic reason to hand out a 12A certificate, no? The actual 12A rating itself I’m not going to quibble with too much, as it got PG-13 in the States and 12A in Ireland, so it’s probable that the BBFC just didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb by giving it a PG rating.

But at least Ireland came up with a semi-plausible reason for their 12A, citing ‘moderate sex references’. By giving a film a 12A purely for underage drinking, the BBFC have opened up an unwelcome can of worms, a can of worms which BBFC pedants like me are quick to catch on to.

See, Love, Simon, another 12A-rated film, also contains a party scene where the characters (who are in High School, and thus underage), drank alcohol. Yet Love, Simon is rated 12A for ‘infrequent strong language, moderate sex references’, with no mention of the underage drinking in the extended insight or short insight.

Two film rating observations regarding Wes Anderson films

Being as big a BBFC nerd as I am can be an affliction sometimes. It means that, for purposes of BBFC research, I end up watching titles that I would not watch otherwise (Fairy Tale – Dragon Cry, Red Sparrow, etc), and not particularly enjoying the experience.

Isle of Dogs was another example of such film. It wasn’t a bad film at all, but Wes Anderson is just not to my taste, and I didn’t feel like the film had enough of a sense of jeopardy regarding the dogs' mission, to keep me gripped.

U-rated films with the longest (or most eye-catching) BBFC short insights

Unlike the MPAA rating ‘G’ which is almost becoming obsolete these days (even My Little Pony: The Movie got a PG in America) the BBFC does not require a film to be squeaky clean in order to get a U-rating (ditto Ireland and their equivalent to the U, G).

The guidelines at U allow for more in the way of comic violence, threat, very elementary sexual innuendo (eg flirting) and mature themes than the Americans. (Case in point: Inside Out, Finding Dory and Love and Friendship were all U/G here and in Ireland, yet received a PG in America.)

When I was wondering around WHSmith and Tesco, I noticed a few DVDs which really testify to this fact, from the sheer length of their short insights (in case you hadn’t realised, turning over DVD cases and reading the back is one of my favourite pastimes *James Franco in The Disaster Artist-style awkward laugh*).

The Angry Birds Movie, which was cut to get a U-rating (read about why here), is the longest with four issues at U:

Brigsby Where?

Add Brigsby Bear to the list of films I’m going to need to watch purely for BBFC research purposes (like with Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry).

Brigsby Bear is a PG-13 in the States and a 12A in Ireland, yet a 15 in the UK. This in itself is not that bizarre; The Shallows also got those three ratings by the three respective ratings boards.

But it’s the classification reasons that I find bizarre. In their short insight, the BBFC flagged the ‘scene of drug misuses, moderate sex references’.

As with sex, I’ve detected a clear hierarchy of strictness when it comes to drug use at PG-13/12A. In terms of strictness, it goes IFCO > BBFC > MPAA.

The MPAA are the most lax when it comes to drug use, having passed Ray at PG-13, when that got 15 in the UK and Ireland.

David Fincher’s Oscar-winning The Social Network, a PG-13 in the States and a 12A in the UK, got a 15A in Ireland. The Irish flagged ‘the scene of strong drugs misusage’ as the principal reason for its 15A. 

Indeed, many might be surprised that The Social Network only got a 12A in the UK, given the scene in question is a Harvard party, where one girl snorts cocaine off another’s body.

She played the fiddle in an Irish band, but she fell in love with an Englishman.

Given that romance is my favourite genre, it goes without saying that I've seen my fair share of love scenes in movies. There’s an unofficial hierarchy when it comes to how strict the BBFC, IFCO and MPAA are when it comes to lovemaking at 12A/PG-13, and it goes (from least strict to strictest): BBFC < IFCO < MPAA.

For example, the sex scenes in The Light between Oceans, Brooklyn and My Cousin Rachel received the 12A equivalent in all three films boards. About 80% of PG-13-rated sex scenes do fall in that Venn diagram intersection of BBFC, IFCO and MPAA rating sameness.

Saoirse Ronan shines in Brooklyn. She's also in the music video of Ed Sheeran's 'Galway Girl' a song I currently have stuck in my head!

Second Guessing the Most Complaints the BBFC Got in 2016

The BBFC’s 2016 Annual Report is set to be dropped any day now (2015's one came out late June last year), and for me, it’s basically like waiting for Christmas. Of course I’ll do an extensive coverage of the Report when it comes out, as I did with the 2015 one, but for now, I thought I’d guess which films the BBFC got the most complaints about.

Note that these are my predictions for public feedback, not my own thoughts about the BBFC’s performance in 2016, which I have outlined in this blog post already.

01. 10 Cloverfield Lane (12A, people will say it should have been a 15)

Some BBFC nerdiness at the Oscar nominations.

Hey Em, don't make it sad. Take a shite batch of Oscar nominations and make it better! With BBFC stats and shiz, of course.

The Oscars and the Razzies for the BBFC, 2016

The Razzie shortlist was leaked and I see Cara Delevingne didn’t make the Worst Supporting actress shortlist, once again illustrating that the Razzies don’t deliver on their promise of honouring the worst of the year (which Blahra undoubtedly was), but instead, jumping on the bandwagon of critically panned films and knocking A-listers down a peg or two.

Anyway, I digress. I’m a massive BBFC nerd (you don’t say), and they release an Annual Report every June or so, and I love poring over it, because they discuss high-profile and contentious decisions at each age category. I’m just as fascinated as to why something’s a PG rather than a U as I am why something’s a 15 rather than an 18, and the equal exposure they give to all the ratings, as well as revealing which films got the most complaints each year, makes for fascinating reading.

That report is compiled by the BBFC, and I thought I’d do my own personal Razzies and Oscars of the BBFC for films that came out last year, just to add another dimension/point of view to BBFC reviews!

Before I discuss some decisions I strongly agreed (the Oscars) and disagreed (the Razzies), I will blather about some random thoughts which don’t fit into either category. My current eighth favourite film of 2016, High or High Water, was rated 15 for ‘strong language, violence, sex’. I have no qualms with the age rating, nor the first two classification issues. The ‘strong sex’ in question, however, gave me false hope; I was hoping it might feature dishy Chris Pine. Instead, it was his on-screen brother, played by Ben Foster, being ridden. Not the BBFC’s fault, I know, and says more about my dirty mind than their choice of lexicon. But I felt quite let down. 

At least the sex scene in Hell or High Water could be classified as strong, however brief it was. In 2016 I caught up with a couple of films that featured in awards season for the previous year, two of which were Wild Tales and 45 Years. Argentinian film Wild Tales was an anthology of six short films, wonderfully inventive and blackly comic. 45 Years, a film about a wife who discovers her husband’s secret in the week building up to their 45 year anniversary, was less gripping, but anchored by an amazing performance by Charlotte Rampling. Two completely disparate films, connected by one thing: their BBFC insight promised me strong sex. What strong sex?? I’ve seen raunchier 12s!

In terms of short insight which did deliver on what it said on the tin, the starkest case has to be, to this date, still the only 18-rated 2016 release that I’ve seen (although this will surely change with the release of foreign films Elle and The Handmaiden), The Neon Demon. Rated 18 for ‘strong bloody images, sexual assault, necrophilia’, no one could argue it didn’t have each and every one of those three articles. The last one, in particular, must have been the main reason the film obtained its adult certificate. Jena Malone’s acting in the scene in question was brilliant and I thoroughly commend her for her dedication for making that 18-rated scene so credible, however aberrant the act.

Now, onto the prizegivings!

The BBFC Oscars