Fat Girl banned in Ontario (1 Viewer)

[Bill McA]

It would also render illegal everything from Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (Olivia Hussey was under 18 when it was made) and Malle's Pretty Baby to Sally Mann's photography -- which would be a travesty, and clearly isn't so.

Believe it or not Ted, but Pretty Baby was indeed banned here in Ontario back in 1978, as was Gary's favorite, The Tin Drum (this is no longer the case).
The appeal for Fat Girl is this coming Tuesday and the motion to ban the film has met with opposition from local filmmakers, Atom Egoyan, Ron Mann, Patricia Rozema and the director of the Toronto Film Festival, Piers Handling.
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[Jason Boucher]

Here is the problem with child pornography laws. They ostensibly are passed to protect children from damaging exploitation--but they are enforced based upon the prurient effects on the deviant--not the child. If child protection were the goal, dressing 14 year old girls up like 21 year old women and sending them to a photo shoot in South Beach would be obscene, but not a naked photo of a baby taken by his mother, even if in a provocative pose. When we try to define pornography, we do it based upon whether it would arouse a deviant, not whether it is harmful to the child. This brings in subjectivity. Thus, enforcement rests on what a single prosecutor (and subsequent judges find disturbing), resulting in the controversies with Mann, Maplethorpe, etc. The irony in this is that the judge who is pure of heart would not see anything provocative in a Sally Mann photo and would not find it obscene, but the judge who gets aroused will/should find it pornographic. Dirty old men end up setting the standards. This phenomen is evident in the Meese Report and to a lesser extent, the Starr Report. I don't have the solution.

 

[Oliver]

Isn't nudity a natural thing?
So where is the problem. Sex is part of life. And rape is part of it too. Rape is the mad side of human behing, but it happens every day. Do not pretend it does not happen because it is forbidden to show it.

 

[MickeS]

Jason, what an excellent post. I wish I could have written it, because it expresses exactly what I think.
/Mike
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[Ted Todorov]

Believe it or not Ted, but Pretty Baby was indeed banned here in Ontario back in 1978, as was Gary's favorite, The Tin Drum (this is no longer the case).

Bill, I didn't intend what I said about legality to apply outside the US. I am aware that Canada's laws are different.
Ted

 

[Bill McA]

The appeal decision was held yesterday and the film's ban was upheld by a 3-2 vote.

The film's distributer was astonished by the decision and is considering a court appeal or "some form of civil disobedience".

Meanwhile, the uncut film has been playing in Quebec since August and the uncut version opens this Friday in Vancouver B.C.

 

[Steve Harris]

Just to muddy the waters slightly, the issue in Ontario is not child pornography at all. Under Canadian law the film is not illegal. Yes there is a law against child pornography but it does not apply where the material is art (which I believe turns on the intent of the person who produced the material). The issue is one of morality as, determined by the OFRB, and whether or not a government organ should be able to impose its sense of morality on the general public.

 

[Ike]

I gotta say that Jason's posts is one of the most articulate and understanding posts yet in this thread. Really got me thinking.

 

[Patrick McCart]

I don't support censorship, but what the hell is the director thinking???

It's would be just like Martin Scorsesse asking why Goodfellas got an R rating. Directors should have the intelligence to realize why certain problems arise from distribution of their films!

 

[Janna S]

Jason's post is thought provoking but not completely accurate in its presentation of the way the law works in regard to censorship, pornography, and first amendment issues. He overstates the role of subjectivity. Personal opinions of judges or prosecutors are not the only measure by which laws are enforced and facts are applied. "Because I think so" is not a defensible finding at any level of a case.

Judges, legislators, and prosecutors represent the three branches of government, and they act as checks and balances under most circumstances. Prosecutorial discretion is signficant, but it is subject to challenge. Juries - both petit and grand (although grand juries tend to be rubberstamps for prosecutors) represent the community (the peers of the defendant, in theory) in non-bench issues and trials.

The reference to special prosecutors (Meese, Starr) is a little off point. They are for the most part creatures wholly of the executive branch, and their work often doesn't make it to court to be checked by the other parts of the system. Some may appear to be colored by partisanship, personality, opinion and pecadillo, but others have famously been more independent and upstanding than career prosecutors.

Checks and balances can fail miserably, of course. Bad judges can make bad rulings that injuried parties cannot afford to appeal. Bad prosecutors can overwhelm overworked defense attorneys. Multi-million dollar defense teams can outmaneuver and outsmart individual plaintiffs, prosecutors, and even judges. Special prosecutors can spend dozens of millions of dollars for naught. Legislative compromises can make bad laws that hurt both good people and bad people until the laws are challenged. The system is not perfect. But there are more protections against the individual "dirty old man" in the system than Jason's post reflects.

I have been a prosecutor, a lower court judge, a judicial educator, and a manager of a statewide child protection agency. I have worked on the drafting and developing of both statutes and regulations. My experience in the system probably makes me biased in support of the system overall. I have seen it fail, but I have also seen it succeed. And in my experience the only "dirty old men" who have had sustained and measurable roles in the modern system, at least in jurisdictions that have disabled cronyism and the good old boy network (where I have been fortunate to work), have been defendants.

 

[Brian Perry]

It is possible that in the future it will not matter whether an actual child is depicted in the film or if an adult is posing as a child. There are cases in the court system now dealing with computer-generated pictures of children and whether they can be prosecuted as child porn. Apparently some people are creating lifelike "virtual" images of children in sexual positions, presumably with the intent to distribute them to those seeking immunity from child porn laws. The question is if the images are not of an actual child, has the law been broken?

Some would say yes, because they still try to appeal to the deviant or prurient interests of the viewer. In addition, prosecutors say that the burden becomes too great to prove if the image is of an actual child. There's no way law enforcement would have the resources to analyze every picture's origin. They argue that the mere fact that it depicts an underage person is enough.

This would seem to also apply to the distinction being made to films. If the goal is to protect children themselves, then one could argue that an adult playing the part is harmless. However, if the ultimate goal is to reduce or eliminate the exploitation of children by taking away the images that whet the exploiters' appetite, then it may be that the origin of the images is irrelevant.

(I'm not arguing that any of the films earlier mentioned should be considered child porn. I'm just saying that it appears that the question of obscenity or illegality may not depend on if an actual child is involved or an adult portraying one.)

 

[Ted Todorov]

I don't support censorship, but what the hell is the director thinking???
It's would be just like Martin Scorsesse asking why Goodfellas got an R rating. Directors should have the intelligence to realize why certain problems arise from distribution of their films!

Why in the world would the director think about or care what problems her film will have in one single province of a foreign country on a different continent??
Fat Girl had no problems whatsoever in its native country (France). Should Steven Spielberg have worried about what Singapore would say about the nudity in Schindler's List?
Ted

 

[Johnny G]

I just thought Canadians might like to know this is coming to DVD from Alliance on 22/2/2005

 

[Pete-D]

Those are good points, Vince. I have no interest in seeing this film, but it does bring up some issues.

I never really thought of the analogy to protraying drug use or other illegal acts on screen. I guess the justification would be "well they're not really doing those drugs", but then again, in sex scenes, the actors are not actually having sex.

I dunno, really its a bit of a hazy line. In the U.K., I think the rules are a lot more laxed, but then again I believe the age of consent there is 16. Keira Knightley had nude scenes in a movie at age 16 I believe. I also remember a sex scene in Trainspotting where I'm pretty sure the girl was under 18.

Was Trainspotting also banned in Ontario?

 

[Brad E]

What I find ironic about this thread is that the age of consent in Canada is 14. So a 40 year old man could legally have intercourse with a 14 year old as long as he was not in a position of authority.

I don't know anything about the film in question though.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

What I find ironic is the age of this discussion

 

[JonZ]

"Thora Birch was 16 or 17 when American Beauty was filmed.
The topless scene used a body double. If you look closely, the shot is through a window- and the window frame goes right aross her neck. The area in the top window was her, the area in the bottom was a body double edited in later."
Actually there was no body double. Thora has said she did it with permission.
"What do you think the filmmaker's point was? I felt like she was just trying to piss me off"
I think this lady just likes to be controversial.
Read this review of her followup to Fat Girl...
http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/mo...ex_comedy.html
and a Fat Girl review....
http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/mo.../fat_girl.html
Also, Fat Girl is available from Criterion for those interested.
I also remembered seeing this and pasted it:
" It didn't occur to me when I first set up this page, but someone recently pointed out that Christi was only 15 (or 16 at most) when she shot her nude scenes in Night of the Demons 2 (the film was released well after it was shot, for those of you doing the math) — and only a year older for Night of the Scarecrow. Of course, the law forbids any sort of filmed, photographed, or otherwise published "obscenity" (which includes nudity) to people under 18. So how to explain Christi's published moments in the buff? Or Thora Birch's, for that matter? Or Michelle Johnson's? Or Brooke Shields'?
For a time I thought parental consent was the key factor, although I suspected that the parents' professional involvement might also play a role in getting screen nudity approved. (Christi and Brooke were both managed by their mothers, Thora by her father.) But later I learned (while reading an old article about Michelle Johnson) that permission from the parents isn't enough — you have to get the script approved by a judge. Federal law punishes "any parent, legal guardian, or person having custody or control of a minor who knowingly permits [a] minor to engage in ... sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct." The escape clause is the one providing that underage nudity, etc., is not a criminal offense as long as there's some "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value". In other words, whether or not a minor's naughty bits can legally be shown depends on the filmmaker's ability to argue the work's artistic merits, which is why some films (like American Beauty, Blame It On Rio, and Night of the Demons 2) open at theaters or video stores and others (like Tin Drum) open at court."

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

I wish I would have known that "Fat Girl" was the title of a movie before I clicked on this thread. I thought Ontario had put up a "No Fat Chicks" billboard or something.

 

[Rob Bartlett]

Now what in the statute constitutes "artistic purposes". If the movie starred Vin Diesel, was directed by Michael Bay and had a budget of more the twenty million dollars, would it no longer be artistic enough to show underage girls in sex scenes? Will they not be able to use topless minors in the sequel Fat Girl 2: Girl Fatter? The line between art and commerce is always going to be a fine one. Unless the no one profits from the film, then it's status as "true art" can be qualified, though not neccesarily invalidated. It's not "pornographic" in the strictest sense of the word, but there are many films of susbtantial work that use the sexual aspects to sell themselves.
The fact that the director made the scenes "unerotic" makes little sense to begin with. Sure, there are teenager fanciers who have fantasies about having a girl over for a candlelit dinner, but I'm pretty sure the scenes in the film work right up many's alleys. The director can't be responsible for whatever enjoyment some pervert takes from her film, and I'm willing to believe she didn't intend the film for that, (though I'm just as willing to believe she created shock value for its own sake) so if the platform that a film that can entice potential pedophiles, whether or not it meant to is a valid one, then this film is fair game.

 

[Robert Ringwald]

Mena Suvari (I believe she was over 18 anyways) said she was fine doing a nude scene. And Thora needed permission because of her age. It was mentioned on the commentary of the DVD by writer Alan Ball or direct Sam Mendes, I'm not sure which.