Friday, June 15, 2012

THEY'RE STARTING TO SHIMMY: Related lists -- PG/PG-13 movies with more nudity than expected, and eight movies that should never have been rated PG. Really, it was okay for kids to know that this house is clean?

As a parent -- the alleged target market for the MPAA -- I find their ratings to be basically useless, and rely more on social networks, as well as commercial sites like Common Sense Media, to tell me what I actually need to know in assessing a film's appropriateness for children, especially the specifics on what language is employed.  YMMV.

29 comments:

  1. Joseph J. Finn9:01 AM

    Adam, the British Board of Film Classifications has an app that has very good, detailed descriptions of why a movie gets the rating it does so that might be helpful as well.

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  2. Jordan9:42 AM

    Maybe it's because I have yet to have a caffeinated beverage today, but I didn't understand the second list.  It seems to be saying that those eight movies were improperly rated, but since it admits that there was no PG-13 rating when most of them came out, does it think that those should be all be R's?

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  3. Language is the one thing where there is a bright-line rule, as I understand--if you have more than one f-bomb, or the f-bomb is used in a sexual (rather than an expletive) sense, you're an R.  Everything else is fuzzy (at least for the line between R and PG-13), and I think the vast majority of movies that get an R get it automatically for language.  This raises two questions:

    1.  What about a movie that doesn't contain profanity, but contain a lot of violence or sexual content? A good example currently in theatres is Prometheus, which I don't think contains a single f-bomb, but is rated R because of violence/dread (basically, it gets the R for the med-pod scene).
    2.  A movie that has a brief sustained period of language, but is otherwise pure as the driven snow.  The best example of this is The King's Speech, which contains just that one outburst of profanity from Firth, but since it contained more than one f-bomb, automatically an R.

    When the MPAA starts getting into value judgments about "this movie is IMPORTANT, and therefore, we should depart from our rules!," as people pressed them to do for Bully earlier this year, that makes me uncomfortable.

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  4. Genevieve10:23 AM

    So does Screenit.com (well, they have a website, I don't know if there's an app).  It was very useful when the kiddo was younger, and I still use it from time to time. 

    Will have to check out the British one.

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  5. Genevieve10:25 AM

    Whale Rider is in the same category as King's Speech -- a terrific movie, totally appropriate for tweens (though there's a brief but scary death-in-childbirth scene right at the beginning I might well skip), rated R because one character has something that most tweens would not recognize as drug paraphernalia.  Ebert did a great rant about it when it came out.

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  6. Goghaway11:30 AM

    Whoa- Whale Rider was rated R? That's insane.

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  7. Marsha11:36 AM

    <span>I absolutely do not understand why children are fine if they hear the word f*ck once, but will be scarred for life if they hear it twice.</span>

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  8. I propose a new system based on how traumatizing films are.  PG - Disney, Pixar anything starring Julia Roberts or Zac Efron.  PG-13 - movies involving zombies, aliens, things that go bump in the night.  R - anything starring Nicolas Cage or Adam Sandler.

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  9. Marsha11:42 AM

    The problem, of course, is that people don't use these ratings as a guideline for further research, they abdicate authority to the raters. PG means "parental guidance." In other words, you know your kid and we don't, so we're going to tell you what's in this movie that might be of concern, and you should decide if your kid can handle it, and whether you should go with them. I'm not saying the MPAA is perfect, but they also shouldn't be laying down absolute law on what is ok for one 10 year old, when each is so different from the kid next door.

    In my view, the MPAA should be assigning G ratings in such a way that any average parent (not hyper permissive ones, nor hypervigilant ones) would be fine letting their small child see the movie, even without parents in the room. We should be able to trust a G rating without further research. Past that, we need to know WHY a film got a PG, PG-13, or R, and parents should use their own judgment from there. But this is not the way it happens.

    I would feel more strongly about the MPAA preventing teenagers from seeing movies with the R and X ratings, but given cable, streaming, and rentals, you're only preventing them from seeing it in a certain venue, so it's less of a problem for me.

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  10. I LOVE the BBFC site/app. I plan on using it in the future to determine why a scary movie is scary so that I can decide whether it's one I should see or not.

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  11. This post is just making me think all over again about "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" and how ANGRY it made me toward the MPAA.  If you've never seen it, do, and be prepared to froth at the mouth.

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  12. I'm a fan of Quentin Tarantino's app, "Should Your Child Watch This Fucking Movie or Should I ShootHim In The Face Instead?"

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  13. isaac_spaceman1:54 PM

    People really need to get over their fear of butt nudity.  I don't know why the author of that piece would be shocked or scandalized because she saw a butt in Kramer vs. Kramer, or for that matter why CBS has to blurcle half the water-based challenges on Survivor because the contestants have lost so much weight that their drawers keep sagging.  Everybody has a butt, and while I understand (without agreeing with) the need to give some kind of warning about the depiction of a butt engaged in affairs amorous or scatalogical, that's because of what the butt's owner is doing at the time, not because of the butt itself.  I can't think of anybody who truly would be scandalized by Survivor Challenge Wedgie. 

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  14. isaac_spaceman1:57 PM

    Language should get you a PG and nothing else.  PG is supposed to be okay for 13-17-year olds, right?  I will never understand the sense in having a rating system that says a realistic depiction of the language of the average 13-17-year-old is inappropriate for 13-17-year-olds. 

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  15. Tosy and Cosh2:27 PM

    The question it raises for me is if you can still have frontal nudity today and get the PG-13 (Titanic, for example). My sense is not at all ever, but I may be off.

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  16. Stevie2:30 PM

    Once gets an R rating largely over this.

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  17. Joseph Finn3:17 PM

    Julia Roberts isn't traumatizing?!?

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  18. As for the PG movies which shouldn't be, both Poltergeist and Watership Down had profound effects on me as a child (9-10).  Watership Down -- because of it's beauty, raw emotion, and horror.  Poltergeist because it gave me a fear of clowns (more than I had before) and lights on in closets.  It also was the horror movie that got me to hate horror.

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  19. Genevieve5:39 PM

    Thanks, I was trying to remember why Once was rated R (12-year-old was interested, after seeing the Tonys).  Now I will look on the BBC app for specifics.

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  20. Genevieve5:40 PM

    PG is usually considered OK for younger kids - do you mean PG-13?

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  21. I feel the need to take this moment to mock my 26 year-old coworker who got carded going to see Prometheus last weekend.  Geoff, I mock thee.

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  22. You're not wrong, but I think there's a lot of resistance on this issue because some corners of the world -- some of them surprisingly progressive -- are still reeling from the shocking and gratuitous presentation of Michael Douglas' posterior in Basic Instinct.

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  23. Relatedly, most anything that gets edited for content on basic cable is pretty much unwatchable, unless I'm brain-dead enough to find amusement looking for lip-synch laughs and improbable substitutions.  I assume the FCC is to blame for that rather than the MPAA; however, I choose to blame Time Warner Cable.  This is not a rational position, but some messengers are indisputably worth shooting.

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  24. And yet I would show Lucy a tv-edit of Airplane!.  I think she's ready. 

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  25. If she's ready, show her the unexpurgated version.  Downside: potentially a longer conversation, or two.  Upside: potentially a longer conversation, or two.

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  26. No nine-year old needs to hear the intercom conversation at the beginning of the film. And, honestly, I'm not sure when she'll be old enough to get the joke about the Famous Jewish Sports Legends leaflet.

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  27. Joseph J. Finn12:48 AM

    What I call the WGN edit of Breakfast Club is high comedy, with lines like:

    "Flip you, Claire!  Flip you!"

    "Does he slip you some hot loving affection?"

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  28. Anonymous10:25 PM

    It's not the FCC, Phil.  The FCC's authority to regulate for "indecency" is limited to broadcast.  On basic cable, it can only regulate obscenity -- which, I suspect, is not what you're talking about.

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  29. That was me.  Weird.  I'm on the same computer as always.

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