A short rant on violence vs. sex

By coincidence, I saw 2 violent films last week, both based on graphic novels: 300 and 30 Days of Night. (Honestly, the only reason I wanted to see 300 was because I thought its parody, Meet the Spartans, looked fun, but I figured I should see the original first). 300 was a ludicrous cartoon, almost literally, filmed with real actors but with CGI backgrounds, and if I'm not mistaken, even the muscles of the near-naked bodies of the male soldiers were augmented by CGI--I'm not even gonna mention the spectacular gayness of this frat boy movie. The violence was very brutal and graphic, even though the blood which was constantly spattering everything in sight was mostly black rather than red. 30 Days of Night, a vampire movie set in an Alaskan town where it's dark for a month at a time (apparently in real life, there would be at least a few hours of twilight light every day), has less CGI but as much violence, explicitly and brutally carried out against both humans and vampires. The film starts out well, but goes down the tedious one-note toilet by the halfway mark.

I don't object to screen violence; one of my favorite movies of all time is Clockwork Orange. But I am truly shocked that these movies got "R" ratings. The violence, to repeat myself, is not only graphic but extremely brutal. I imagine the argument for giving these films less than an NC-17 goes as follows: In 300, it's righteous war, and it's mostly CGI; in 30 Days of Night, it's mostly against vampires who aren't as human as we are--and the vampires in this film are particularly animalistic. But the irritating part to me is that films like this will get mass distribution, but any film that shows a little too much human genitalia, or a pair of hips grinding together one too many times, will get slapped with the highly restrictive NC-17. I am reminded of George Carlin's wonderful routine in which he suggests replacing the word "kill" in westerns with the word "fuck," as in, "OK, sheriff, we're gonna fuck ya now, but we're gonna fuck ya slow." Sadly, Carlin died yesterday, but his battles against hypocrisy are still relevant and vital.