'South Park' bigger, longer and nearly NC-17 BY Andy Seiler USA Today
If the Motion Picture Association of America could do it over, _South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut_ probably would receive an NC-17 rating, not an R, says Jack Valenti, the MPAA's president.
"We probably made a mistake on _South Park_," he says.
But Valenti says he will never regret the board's NC-17 rating for Stanley Kubrick's original cut of _Eyes Wide Shut_, which resulted in Warner Bros. Blocking out characters in an orgy scene so the film could be rated R. (Kubrick's cut will play overseas.)
_South Park_, a raunchy cartoon that features foul language and sexual situations, and the erotic thriller _Eyes Wide Shut_ are the latest films to receive controversial ratings from the MPAA, which uses anonymous parents to rate movies.
"The only people who are upset about this are critics and directors," says Valenti, who has not screened either version of _Eyes Wide Shut_.
Critic Roger Ebert has led the charge against the R-rated _Eyes_, in which digitally created characters hide the copulating extras. He has called the edited version "ridiculous" and "a travesty." Other newspaper critics have echoed his views.
Valenti counters: "What bothers me is that some of the so-called intellectual critics think they can determine the standard by which these pictures should be judged. The Roger Eberts and these critics think we're deaf, dumb and blind."
But it is not only the critics.
"We may be in the minority of moviegoers, but there are a lot of us who care about this kind of thing," says Jim Wilkinson, 22, a Louisville film fan who has seen _Eyes_ twice and has criticized the revisions on the Internet.
Michael Acuba, a high school senior from Dumont, N.J., calls the MPAA prudish.
Nothing going on behind the blocking could have shocked the typical American teen-ager, says Acuba, who is just old enough to attend the movie without a parent.
Ebert has called for a ratings category that would distinguish between hard-core pornography and movies with tamer adult content that is too strong for an R rating.
Valenti says his lawyers have advised him that such a rating would be illegal. The present ratings system is the only thing protecting the USA from government censorship, he says.
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