Allowable Pelvic Thrusts

So there's a new movie coming out called Lust, Caution, directed by Ang Lee, who can be forgiven for directing The Hulk because he went on to direct Brokeback Mountain - which was the best picture of 2005, even though the Academy voters mistakenly gave the award to Crash. Here's an article from CNN that talks about the film's rating and how the MPAA arrived at that rating.

The new film is described on the Focus Features website as "[a] startling erotic espionage thriller about the fate of an ordinary woman's heart." The film received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA because of graphic sexuality, and an appeal is impossible because some of the sex scenes violated a number of the MPAA's ratings board's "unwritten rules" (quoting the CNN article linked to above), including the number of "allowable pelvic thrusts."

And because Universal Pictures, the parent company of Focus, is a member of the MPAA, the film must be released with a rating, which means that they can't go with the "unrated" tag. NC-17, of course, is the kiss of box office death, although I suppose that having Lee's name attached to it might up the gross a bit, especially in more sophisticated markets.

Lee has final cut on the picture, which means that it's up to him whether or not to make cuts to try to achieve an R rating - something he is apparently not going to do, and it looks like Focus is going to back him on it, so props to both of them for not compromising the film for the sake of the box office take.

Now, having said all that, let's get back to the allowable pelvic thrusts, for just a moment, hmm? Is there some guy - or girl, I suppose - sitting in the auditorium during the screening, with a clipboard at hand, actually counting the number of pelvic thrusts? Or is this just one of those things that you "know when you see it," the way some people define obscenity? Was there a meeting after the screening? Did they have to confer in order to discuss whether or not there was too much pelvic thrusting - or whether there might, in fact, have been just enough?

And doesn't "allowable pelvic thrusts" sound like the name of a band that's going to headline at X-Fest one day?