It's not an easy system though, and I think that's what the tweaking over the past few years has been about. A movie can be R for one use of the word "fuck" or for a thirty-minute shoot-out with guts and blood and such or for simulated sex scenes or even a flash of male genitalia (as opposed to female nudity, which can be shown with PG-13). It's not easy to look at an R and figure out which vice you're trying to warn people against.
And, like I said, I find the idea that male nudity is more restricted-access than female ridiculous, that violence is less offensive than sex puritanical and hysteric (no doubt, this is encouraged by the not one but two religious leaders having an input on a film's rating because religion? cool with violence, not cool with teh boobies) and so on. That's my personal opinion though, so I can't base a ratings system around it, but you could get rid of the stupid one we have now where there's some strange, unlevel threshhold for ratings that you can puncture with a penis or an f-bomb. Perhaps we would benefit if movies did take a tip from TV and had MA and V ratings in addition to the age one. If you had the same bars of age---G for up to 8-10, PG 10-13, PG-13 13-17, R 17+--but added a select (not like TV with its billions of options) few letters afterward, you could convey even when you're not watching the screened-for-all-audiences preview what in the film merited the rating it got and make your decision from there. So, if it's R-L, that means the worst bits are the language, and if that's your concern as a parent, now you know. Of course, it could be a cocktail of L-MA-V, and I don't know what to do from there.
Honestly, edgehopper had it right with abolishing the system and just forcing people to read reviews with the relevant warnings either in the paper with the showtimes or at the theater itself. Beats taking out your wrath on a kid making the minimum wage because he didn't know to warn you...
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Date: 2007-01-20 08:22 pm (UTC)And, like I said, I find the idea that male nudity is more restricted-access than female ridiculous, that violence is less offensive than sex puritanical and hysteric (no doubt, this is encouraged by the not one but two religious leaders having an input on a film's rating because religion? cool with violence, not cool with teh boobies) and so on. That's my personal opinion though, so I can't base a ratings system around it, but you could get rid of the stupid one we have now where there's some strange, unlevel threshhold for ratings that you can puncture with a penis or an f-bomb. Perhaps we would benefit if movies did take a tip from TV and had MA and V ratings in addition to the age one. If you had the same bars of age---G for up to 8-10, PG 10-13, PG-13 13-17, R 17+--but added a select (not like TV with its billions of options) few letters afterward, you could convey even when you're not watching the screened-for-all-audiences preview what in the film merited the rating it got and make your decision from there. So, if it's R-L, that means the worst bits are the language, and if that's your concern as a parent, now you know. Of course, it could be a cocktail of L-MA-V, and I don't know what to do from there.
Honestly,