8 Lessons Learned from the 2019 BBFC Annual Report

The blog is rated 15 for strong sex references and drug references.

On Thursday, the BBFC dropped their 2019 Annual Report, which for film classification nerds, is also known as 'Most Complained about Films to the BBFC Day'. I spent Friday evening poring through the report, looking for clues and new information, and psycho-analysing every adjective used in the report. In short, I was in heaven.

Here were eight prominent things I noticed from reading it:

01. Emma knows her BBFC…

Tale as old as time… that the first point I make every year when discussing the BBFC annual report, is not an observation, but rather, a shameless display of braggadocio. The three most complained about films in 2019 were Joker, The Favourite and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and I'd predicted all three of these in my prognostication blog.

Film review: SPIONE (Fritz Lang, 1928)

A criminal mastermind, Haghi, wishes to get his hand on some Japanese government secrets. In order to do so, he enlists the talents of the Russian spy Sonja Baranikowa, who must use her feminine wiles to procure information from a debonair young spy, known only as his number, 326. Haghi's immoral plans are considerably complicated, however, when Sonja falls for the man she is supposed to be manipulating.

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. 

I go to HMV for DVDs, I come back with intel on the BBFC

^^ Title a very tenuous reference to ‘Guns and Ships’ from the Hamilton soundtrack, which I am absolutely obsessed with!

So, whenever I go to HMV to buy something, I spend way more time in store than necessary, due to my natural inclination for turning every DVD around so I can read the BBFC short insight on the back. Here are a few points of interest from the last time I went:

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.

Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh, 2013)

Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) has been waiting for her husband Martin to be freed from prison for four years (he, played by Channing Tatum, was sent down for insider trading). After the day occurs and he is finally let out, however, she is taken over by spells of depression which culminates in her driving her car into a brick wall. This seeming cry of help is noticed by trendy clinical psychiatrist  Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law). Dr. Banks allows her release from hospital on the proviso that she checks in with him a few times a week. 

After trying various standard medications to try and elevate her mood to no avail, he puts her on the newest mood drug, Ablixa, which rejuvenates her, giving her energy, happiness and a sex drive, much to her husband’s delight. However, it comes with the considerable side effect of almost fantastically lucid sleep-walking that culminates in a terrible occurrence that leads to Emily getting jailed and Dr Banks questioning his practices.

Soderbergh talked about Side Effects being his last film. It would be a massive shame for the cinematic world to miss out on his talents, which brought us an eclectic range of pictures from fun ensemble heist movie Ocean’s Eleven, to Channing Tatum as a male stripper in Magic Mike, to inspirational feminist biopic Erin Brockovich, to the engrossing patchwork of drug tales in Traffic, to name but a few.

For all his faltering – I was left wanting by Contagion and Ocean’s Twelve was nothing short of a mess, Soderbergh is a talented, versatile director, and he is at the top of his game in this twisty, convoluted medical thriller. Under pseudonym Peter Andrews, he also takes charge of the film’s cinematography, as well as editing (curiously, under the alias of Mary Ann Bernard); rendering this a proper Soderbergh picture, from top to bottom.

Finally, the film is aided considerably by Scott Z. Burns’ cerebral script, which captures the workings of the legal, pharmaceutical and psychological industries, as well as all the flaws of Jude Law’s protagonist.

For his part, Jude Law puts in one of his finer performances. His last collaboration with Soderbergh in Contagion – another medical drama – featured him sporting a bizarre Aussie accent and completely failing to impress, or convince. Here, he lays true to his roots in playing a British psychologist. As his character explains, he came to New York to practice psychology because, if you say you’re going to see a shrink in Britain, people assume you’re sick. If you say you’re seeing a shrink in America, that implies you’re getting better.

His character is driven by lucre at the beginning of the film, and, in a story where one of the character was sent away for letting the investment banking culture go to his head, the perils of greed are starkly highlighted throughout. In that case, it initially becomes hard to warm to Law, with his cushy job, swanky downtown Manhattan flat and his knack of only taking a true concern with Mara’s character when things takes a bitter turn. However, as the film progresses, we do come to empathise and pity him, especially when the rug is pulled from under him and he stands to lose everything he’s worked so hard for.

Rooney Mara is, as ever, perfect. In Side Effects, her character displayed this knack of chewing her lip whenever she wasn’t speaking, which I can’t say I noticed in her previous acting performances. I couldn’t tell if it was an affectation or something the character was supposed to be doing.

When the film finished, thinking about, I realised which one it was, and it renders her performance a very clever one indeed. Her large, glassy blue eyes make for magnetic watching, and although the film is relatively low on “thrills” by Hollywood’s Saw-standards, one scene, in which she looks in the mirror and sees a transfigured  reflection staring back at her, is disturbing despite its simplicity.

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Channing Tatum are sadly, less convincing in their more thinly-sketched roles, although thankfully, it doesn’t detract from the genius of Side Effects, which made for very effective entertainment on a Wednesday night, and a welcome change from the mindless gunk Hollywood is serving up as cinema these days. If this truly is Soderbergh’s last film, then he has well and truly gone out with a bang.

Mark: 8/10

Book review: MELTDOWN (Ben Elton)

Pride, as we all know, comes before a fall, and nothing epitomizes this better than the recent financial crisis, wherein ill-advised gambles made by bankers and a hubbub of lending loans for people who weren’t ready to buy a house came together in the mother of all hubrises. Ben Elton uses the credit crisis as the backdrop to his book, wherein a group of University friends who have all lucked out – to varying degrees – in their following life choices find that none of them are untouchable from the financial woes of the world.

At the centre of the story is London investment banker Jimmy Corby, an affable, happy-go-lucky man who fell into his trading job with the touch of good fortune that had accompanied him in almost every other step of his life, including meeting his ditzy, well-meaning wife Monica, without whom, it is generally agreed that Corby would have spiralled into the descending spiral of a heart attack or crack addiction. 

His old Uni mates, which include fellow banker Rupert, who carries his craft out with much more of a sneering veneer than Jim, Dave, an established architect, Henry, a self-conscious political activist and Lizzie and Robbo, a married couple, amongst whom she is the frontline of a popular food company that caters for upmarket events and he, mooching off her success.

The friends – and all their wives – have all been in frequent contact since their callow University days, though it is noted that their friendship has barely been tested, such is the cushiness of their jobs (all of them are comfortably on £50,000, minimum, their kids are in private education and they all have big-ass mortgages to match.)

But then along comes the financial crisis, and everything the main characters are used to, comes crashing down. Jimmy and Monica, with their three kids in their gigantic £7million house in Notting Hill, first have to let their nanny go, before facing the awkward conversation with the Headteacher wherein they’re told that as they can no longer afford their son Toby’s fees, they won’t be welcome there. Social satire is rife; the conversation between Jim and the teacher when state education is suggested as a viable option wouldn’t be out of place in a Catherine Tate sketch.

Before the crunch, Jimmy had invested in a road in Hackney with a view of having his friend Dave’s company re-designing it, making it more glamorous and bringing in some big bucks, but when the possibility of this goes out of the window, the street becomes nothing more than a popular squatting site for a local hobo called Bob. In one hilarious moment, Jimmy contemplates re-using a nappy on his youngest daughter Lillie in order to save 18p.

The fall-from-grace overtones could not be clearer, and Jimmy realising the error of his city culture ways is the ultimate in bolting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but there is joy and bathos to be had in his adventure.

Ben Elton throws in a few of his signature twists in the story, and with the unfurling of various friends’ economic situations, also reveals that the oh-so-perfect lives that each of the friends thought they led were really anything but – and how important their finances played in sustaining the illusion that all was well.

It’s very hard to be at the bottom, especially having been at the top for so long, but Jimmy and Monica are fairly likeable protagonists who we as the audience can warm to, even if some of their dialogues (such as the one when first deciding about what state school to put their son in) hint at the blissful ignorance that those who perceive themselves to be the upper strata of society have on certain life matters.

For the most part, Ben Elton tries to abstain from coming across as overly preachy and playing the blame game in his cautionary tale, and rather than pointing fingers or going for the banker bashing route, cannily points out that he without sin can cast the first stone; Henry, at the time of the crunch an esteemed politician, reprimands Jimmy and Rupert for their heady banker ways, yet he doesn’t hesitate to claim benefits on his second house in Berkshire – a wily nod at the actions of various MPs in the news currently.

The majority of the novel is written in his pithy, witty tone, but there is the odd line of writing that exhibits genuine emotion and does the impossible – has us sympathising for characters living in a mansion. There’s an uncharacteristically sweet denouement from Elton at the end, which, whilst pat, doesn’t ring any less true; it takes losing all the superficial stuff to work out what really matters in life.

Money, after all, doesn’t buy one love.

Grade: A-