The UK Film Board bans the sequel to The Human Centipede!

/Film has the story:

Tom Six‘s film The Human Centipede (First Sequence) became almost immediately notorious for featuring a mad scientist surgeon who kidnaps people and sews them together, end to end, to create a ‘human centipede.’ The film is fairly nasty, although in the end perhaps not quite as insane as the general concept led us all to believe.

The director has been working on a sequel, The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence), which he promised would be far more of an endurance test. And now we seem to have proof that he wasn’t putting up a front. The film has gone before the UK film board, which denied it any possibility of release, based on “a strong focus throughout on the link between sexual arousal and sexual violence and a clear association between pain, perversity and sexual pleasure.”

The info delivered from the UK film board will probably be taken in different ways by different audiences. The ban might be the film’s best possible marketing for audiences that thought the first movie was too tame. For everyone else, however, it could stand as an explicit warning that this film might not be for you.

The Weinsteins win another ratings battle against the MPAA!

The Hollywood Reporter has the story:

In a major victory for filmmaker Julian Schnabel and producer Jon Kilik, the ratings appeals board has overturned the R-rating for Miral, about a 17-year-old Palestinian girl caught up in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Miral will now go out with a PG-13 rating. The Weinstein Co., which also was victorious in getting the NC-17 rating for Blue Valentine overturned, opens the film in select theaters on March 25.

Schnabel has always said he made the movie with hope of sparking a dialogue among young people about Israeli/Palestinian relations, and that an R-rating would have precluded that very audience from seeing the film.

At a hearing in Los Angeles on Thursday morning, Schnabel and Kilik argued their case before the Classification and Ratings Administration's appeals board after all watching the movie together.

Miral had been rated R for "some violent content, including a sexual assault." In overturning the R-rating, the appeals board said Miral is now rated PG-13 for "thematic appeal, and some violent content inlcuding a sexual assault."

Harvey Weinstein will indeed release a PG-13 cut of The King's Speech...

...for better or worse. Here's the story from the A.V. Club:

Despite director Tom Hooper’s strenuous objections, The Weinstein Company is moving forward with a proposed PG-13 edit of The King’s Speech, having just received an okay from the MPAA to release it to theaters as soon as it pulls the original, R-rated version. (Normally a film has to be absent from theaters for 90 days before a re-release is granted; in this case, The King’s Speech was granted a waiver.) As we reported earlier, the Weinsteins’ decision to censor the film was based primarily on helping the Best Picture frontrunner broaden its box-office take by attracting more families—something that Harvey Weinstein apparently felt was more crucial at this point than continuing to make a stand on principle, like he did at the time of the film’s first date with the MPAA. Back then, the only thing that came between The King’s Speech and a PG-13 was a key scene where Colin Firth’s character lets loose with a string of cathartic profanities—and while there’s nothing official yet on what “unique way” (in Weinstein’s words) they’ve found to work around it, we’re assuming that scene is now pretty much gone, perhaps momentarily replaced by an insert of a couple of friendly chaps playing snooker.

-Joey's Two Cents: It is what it is, and yes, I've avoided the porn set story in regard to The King's Speech on purpose...mainly because it's a waste of time. Thoughts?