I am normally the epitome of eqanimity. In fact, if Calvin Klein were to ever put out a new perfume called Equanimity, it would be my face and bared torso that you will see gracing all those black-and-white poster billboards. That is how equanimitous I am. But there are a few topics that will always get me frothing. And I am afraid that our Lembaga Penapisan Filem (LPF) is one of them.

The LPF, in case you don't know, is the body that determines what we get to see on our big screens. (TV stations now have in-house censors). These folks have been wreaking havoc with our viewing pleasure for decades, and they show no signs of letting up.

Many a warung conversation can come alive at the mere mention of some of the crimes against good reason that the LPF have committed. It just takes one guy to start it by saying, "Hey, you all remember or not the time that Schindler's List got banned in Malaysia?" And there will be an instant rejoinder from his teh tarik -sipping buddy, "Haiyo, what kind of stoopid decision is that?"

Their mutual friend, while attacking a chicken tandoori, will add: "The reason they gave is that the movie only showed one side of the issue. In other words, it wasn't fair to the Nazis lah!"

The conversation of course won't end there. There are so many examples to cite that the three warung buddies might most likely miss the last LRT home. Although I don't think Steven Spielberg will have to beg for bagels as a result of his movies being banned here, the consequences for the local film industry are far more severe.

Malaysian movies have for the past few decades been doing an uncanny impersonation of a half-dead bird trapped in a puddle. The Malay phrase for this is " Hidup segan, mati tak mahu ". The reasons for this pitiful phenomenon are varied and complex, but it's safe to say that our Censorship Board is one of them.

In the 1990s alone, there were at least two local movies that were banned outright. The first was Aziz M Osman's Fantasia , a thriller with a supernatural bent. (The soul of a murdered girl time-travels to seek justice). The plot was not that different from the movies we would get in the olden days, but it ran foul of a nascent strain of literalist dogma.

Although the Fantasia script was approved by the relevant body before shooting commenced, the final product made people nervous. When it was banned, the producer Zain Mahmood (father of the now-famous Sabri) had to go through a torturous appeal process that took years, drained his finances and affected his health. When a severely edited version of the movie was finally passed for viewing (with the title changed to Fantasi ), Zain had already passed away. Draw your own conclusions.

The second ban was on Adman Salleh's Amok , which was set in Cherating and had a pretty self-explanatory title. The reason this time is that the theme was considered "not conducive to social order". Cuts had to be made, and no less a personage than our Prime Minister himself stepped in to remove the ban. Presumably as a measure of gratitude, the film-makers began Amok with an epigraph by Dr. Mahathir.

A ratings system was introduced a few years ago, but did this change anything? Of course not. Among all the movies of this year's Oscar crop, American Beauty , Magnolia and Boys Don't Cry don't have much of a chance of getting here. This is the situation that plays right into the hands of counterfeiters and those smug gits who say, "I caught it in Singapore..."

Speaking of Singapore, we have again much to learn from that fine country. Their censorship system is a lot more transparent and accountable, although you still get a few bans. (Most recently, two explicitly S&M; themed movies, the Japanese Ai No Korida and the Korean Lies were struck off the 13th Singapore International Film Festival.)

The question is not one of strictness. Iran, as one would expect, has one of the strictest censorship bodies in the world, and yet their film-makers can profit from it. How? Their movies have to be a lot more creative. There's a really sexy scene in Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh where a young man and woman make love not by touching or being in the same scene but by means of a symbolic ball of snow.

The thing about the Iranian system is that the censorship guidelines are documented and far more explicit (for example, you can't show a close-up of a woman's face for more than 5 seconds) whereas ours is ambiguous and capricious, subject more to the individual whims of the censors of the day than a clear set of rules that you can fall back on.

So film-makers have until now chosen to play safe. The few movies that dare flirt with politics (such as Jogho and especially Ringgit Kasorrga ) are cut so badly that they jump all over the place. There's a scene from Ringgit Kasorrga where a political ceramah is being held. The censors feared that it looked too much like an Umno meeting, and wanted changes made. So an additional little scene was shot in which a volunteer paints a sign: Cawangan Parti Moh . What on earth is Parti Moh? As soon as someone finds out, I suggest we adopt it as an apt metaphor for the times in which we live.