Opinion: So Now Non-PC = Penal Code 187?

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The Sunset Strip launch party for the film ``Captivity’’ has gotten a lot of mileage by preening about being insouciantly, blatantly politically incorrect.

My latest Los Angeles Times column took exception to the ad campaign for the film that opened Friday 13 .... and to the somber language that tried to make ``Captivity’’ sound like a public service warning rather than a torture-porn movie, by noting that 850,000 people are reported missing in the United States every year and that ``many’’ of them are `` never seen again.’’

It’s a fact that more than 830,000 people are reported missing each year; it’s also a fact that almost all of them soon turn up again, unharmed. The ‘’missing’’ report was generated by a family misunderstanding, by the confused aftermath of some catastrophe, by a romantic argument, or – in the case of kids – by a relative or divorced parent holding onto the child.

This ad campaign was strictly about working up people into a fear frenzy – my God, maybe what happens in that movie could happen to me, so I’d better go see it to be prepared.

The party promised cages and torture rooms, and oh yawn, half-naked girls in leather and chains and black tape. Who can’t find that on any weekend in Hollywood?

But to characterize such a party and by inference such a movie as ‘’politically incorrect’’? Political incorrectness is about skewering pretensions and self-importance. Since when have kidnapping, torture and murder been demoted from vicious crimes to merely ``politically incorrect’’ conduct, and anyone who objects is a humorless stiff? Probably at about the same time when kidnapping, torture and murder became just another means for Hollywood fun and profit.