Your Daily Film

The BBFC has said that it is now using an AI censor tool which scans streaming vidoes and creates reports for humans to review. It has used the tool to classify the entire UK catalogue of HBO Max which has recently started its UK service.

TV shows including Game of Thrones and Euphoria have received age ratings for the first time in the UK using the tool. It identifies content that triggers compliance issues, such as violence, nudity and bad language . The flagged scenes are then passed over to BBFC staff for human review.

As a result, all the HBO Max titles were assigned BBFC age ratings -- with Game of Thrones and Euphoria receiving an overall rating of 18, although some individual episodes were rated 15 -- for the platforms UK launch last month.

David Austin, the BBFC chief censor, described the use of AI for HBO Max content as a major step forward in how we support families to make safe and informed viewing decisions.

The BBFC said it had completed the classification of HBO Maxs entire catalogue in six months, a process that normally would have required 1,570 working days -- or more than four years -- of viewing from a compliance officer. The organisation said the final age ratings and content advice remained the sole responsibility of BBFC staff.

Dead Kids (aka Strange Behavior) is a 1981 Australia/USA/New Zealand Sci-Fi horror mystery by Michael Laughlin.
With Michael Murphy, Louise Fletcher and Dan Shor.

Released uncut on pre-cert VHS and was seized by the police during the Video Nasties Panic but did not make the Video Nasties list. Then released uncut on 1986 VHS. Cut by the BBFC for DVD. Uncut in the US

Powerhouse have lined up a release of Michael Laughlin's Strange Behaviour for March.

It hasn't gone through the BBFC just yet. They cut it for vertical wrist slicing in 1993, 2004 and 2008 after having passed it intact on video in 1986.

The BBFC seem to have had a rethink on that policy since the controversy when they cut Soulmate (2013) for similar reasons, and they passed a similar but much stronger scene in Lords of Chaos in 2019. So should be uncut this time. 

I just mention it because it would be quite notable and worth keeping an eye on. Not many films go from being passed intact to cut to uncut again.

The Long Goodbye is a 1973 USA crime mystery thriller by Robert Altman.
With Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt and Sterling Hayden.  

Cut by the BBFC for an X rated 1973 cinema release but uncut on home video. Uncut and R rated in the US.

Promotional Material

When private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is visited by an old friend, this sets in train a series of events in which he s hired to search for a missing novelist (Sterling Hayden) and finds himself on the wrong side of vicious gangsters.

So far so faithful to Raymond Chandler, but Robert Altman s inspired adaptation of the writer s most personal novel takes his legendary detective and relocates him to the selfish, hedonistic culture of 1970s Hollywood, where he finds that his old-fashioned notions of honour and loyalty carry little weight, and even his smoking (universal in film noir) is now frowned upon.

Widely misunderstood at the time, The Long Goodbye is now regarded as one of Altman s best films and one of the outstanding American films of its era, with Gould s shambling, cat-obsessed Marlowe ranking alongside more outwardly faithful interpretations by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.

Versions

uncut run: 111:42s pal: 107:14s		UK: Passed 18 uncut for strong language and violence for: 2013 Arrow Academy RB Blu-ray at UK Amazon 2004 MGM R2 DVD at UK Amazon 1999 Warner VHS 1998 Warner VHS US: Uncut and MPAA R rated for: 2014 Kino Lorber (RA) Blu-ray at US Amazon 2014 Kino Lorber R1 DVD at US Amazon
cut cut:   run: 112m pal: 108m		UK: Passed X (18) after BBFC cuts for: 1973 cinema release Thanks to Pete who obtained the BBFC cuts list: Reel 3 In the scene in which Marty smashes a bottle and mutilates a girl's face, etc.., cut from the flash of the bottle being smashed to the point, after she has been covered with a towel to the point where she moves left and is masked by the backs of the gangsters in mid foreground.