Goodbye, Rempits.

I live in an eccentric Muslim country. I'm not Muslim, just for the record.

One social problem our country has had for a long time is the Mat Rempit fad. Delinquents (I was about to add juvenile, but some of these buggers left their teen years behind light years ago) who congregate on their puny underbone motorcycles, do stupid stunts, harrass other vehicles on the road and generally be a pain in the ass.

To be fair, there are the idiots who throw things at your cars and try to do superman stunts, and there are the ones who just like hanging out in a group. Then you also have the ones who fall into the dark pit of petty crimes like robbery and harrassment.

For a while, there was a law banning more than a certain number of rempits from congregating on the roads. Gone were the days when you used to cringe at the sight of a mass of perhaps 100 bikes or more, weaving like drunks from left to right, and occasionally for kicks, deliberately in front of your car.

The roads were safe, then. Sort of.

This whole rempit thing was compounded by the fact that, if they were idiots, and weaved IN FRONT of your car, and you hit them, because THEY PUT THEMSELVES THERE, it's your fault. I've had it quoted to me in a police station. By a policeman. It's the law.

Not to mention, almost all the snatch thefts I've heard about in Malaysia involve one of those motorbikes. Who runs nowadays? You get the occasional car, but that's not very practical either.

So, back to the story. Malaysia's film industry began booming, and it was inevitable that someone would think, "Hey! If I make a film about rempits, I've got a guaranteed market there!"

Thus began the Rempit Movie Revolution. Roaring success.

Years pass, and the rempits writhe in ecstacy every time a new movie glorifying their culture on the silver screen pops up. This goes on until one day someone realizes the power of the media. Someone with the strings to get things done. (I have no idea who. This is what I imagine. Don't come for me, authorities.)

And the rempits are BANNED! Gasp. No more rempits in movies!

Bravo!

Unfortunately, it was a bit extreme, highlighting our tendency to smother a good steak in lousy sauce. Instead of carefully weeding out the negative elements of rempit-ism, we dug up the entire garden and banned EVERYTHING. Even movies that tell you NOT to be a rempit. Because there are rempits in them.

Despite the heavy-handed overkill, I'd initially applauded the move... until I found out that it applies to drag queens too, including men who dress up in women's clothing for a gag. And then they dropped a rotten cherry tomato on top by banning horror elements, on religious grounds.

Now I wonder. Does this apply to foreign films too, or just local films? If it's the latter, well, that's a double standard. If it's the former, I am going to be one seriously unhappy person who will probably give a lot of business to them movie pirates (not that I do now, cough. Of course not.)

(Another odd thing about our censorship board. We censor love scenes, including relatively innocent ones like clothes-on, hands-only-on-face kissing scenes, but we don't censor violence. 300 is an excellent example. I got to see every single bit of beautifully directed gore, chopped limbs and flying heads and all. Yet kissing scenes are mysteriously fast-fowarded.)

People in power, wake up! It's comforting and easier to label everything as either black or white, but the world often doesn't work that way. Sometimes the gray areas yield the best gems. Create a set of guidelines instead of banning the whole pie. Some of our best and most meaningful movies were created in these gray parts.