Odd for NZ to ban a film in these supposedly more tolerant times. “Injurious to the public good”, eh? State censorship of anything is usually cock-eyed.
For example, the last I read of a film being banned was in the UK years ago - I think it was Straw Dogs (1971). Starring Dustin Hoffman as an American astrophysicist who has moved his family to England to get away from American violence, but then finds more violence than he could ever have imagined in his worst nightmares. Apparently, the film was banned because of a scene where his wife (played by Susan George) was raped and began to enjoy it. I saw the film on video in New Zealand, some years ago. It was quite a good film too - I see it has a 7.6 rating on IMDB. The thing is though, the film was a fiction.
Whilst the British censors might have banned something like that in 1971, the British mores are evidently different nowadays - it seems as though almost anything goes. For example, my 11½ y/o daughter drew my attention to some UK news the other day that ended up with my listening to an Oxford Union debate where it was mentioned that there had apparently been systematic grooming, raping and prostitution of underage (under 16) girls - some just children around the same age as my daughter - by a group of all/mostly Muslim men in the university town of Oxford. The group were convicted of criminal offences as a result, but it seems that the mainstream media, the police, and child protection authorities had all apparently turned a blind eye to it for some time, though it had been reported to them. Presumably the police might have been too busy fighting more serious priority crimes, but then it transpired that almost identical criminal gang activity had been occurring in other parts of the country, with similarly belated action by the MSM, the police, and the child protection authorities. That's bad enough, but the thing is, there has already been some TV documentary work about these crimes, and you can bet that somebody will make a good docu-drama film about this child-grooming at some stage, and that the censors will likely as not just let it alone because it depicts "real life", no doubt thus providing lots of good viewing for closet paedophiles whose prayers for a good, legally authorised wet-dream will have been finally answered.
I wonder, if that happened, whether it could be construed as being “injurious to the public good”, and thus censored.
