Cry me a river--cry me the f***ing Amazon

[trinityvixen]

The MPAA is 'fixing' the movie rating process

Raise your goddamned hand if you didn't need a documentary to tell these idiots that the G-to-triple-X movie rating system is a bunch of hooey? I see. So, that's everyone except the board members responsible for handing out those ratings? Yes, it is.

After a few years of tinkering with the formula--adding "contains nudity" or "drug use" or "sci-fi action violence" (my personal favorite, that last one) to the bottom of the little box saying whether a film is good (aka R) or good for kids (aka G)--they've decided to revamp. Except not really. They're changing the appeals process. Those labels are going to stay, folks; they're just going to mean even less now.

I need to bump the documentary up in my queue, methinks, because I'm mad enough reading this stupid article. We've known forever that the MPAA has the most perverse ideas about what is okay and what isn't. Things that people actually do--fuck and say "fuck," mostly--get movies R-ratings; things we would hope to God(s) never to have to do--decapitate terrorists and shoot up shit--give you the all-clear of a PG-13. That's okay, not their fault--they're just stupid Americans, too, and Americans are Puritans with better tech, meaning they're still all for the witch-burning and crusades in the name of baby Jeebus, but if you show a titty, they're gonna zap you with pain rays.

Mind you, I complain, but I can't fathom a better system, except the one of common sense and pesonal responsibility, which I know wouldn't ever be popular. Film ratings were developed because some asshole complained that Alien upset his kid. Then they started to complain that theaters weren't enforcing the ratings (note to morons everywhere: those ratings aren't legal or binding restrictions on the theaters in any way; if they let you in and you complain about it, they're just going to ban you if it's not their national policy to give a fuck about the MPAA trying to stop fifteen-year-olds from seeing Live Free and Die Harder or whatever). It completely ignores the base problem that the application of the ratings is spotty, heavily biased thanks to input from religious leaders and members of the board who stopped knowing what was/wasn't appropriate for kids back in the 1980s when their kids moved out of the house.

I see this getting worse, much worse, not better. We're going to have more ratings than you find in the corner of the TV screen, and how many of us really have any clue--still--what those ratings mean? You turn on South Park, and it says TV-MA, you figure it out. That's about where my extensive knowledge on these things falls apart, cheers. We should have a new system with symbols instead of coded letters: a silhouette of a cock for male nudity, titties for female nudity; a gun for gun violence, a pike for any kind of edge-weapon violence, and someone doing a shoryuken for punching/martial arts violence; fake glasses with false nose for any movie made by an SNL alum; a brain for movies with subtitles; a guy flying, wearing a cape for any movie--no matter how "high brow" (yes, American Splendor, I am talking about you)--adapted from a comic book or graphic novel (let's show the masses how much of their culture comes from our culture--BITCH!); and the number of the person responsible for any movie made from a television show now twenty years off the air (does anyone have the digits for the guy who brought us The Dukes of Hazzard movie? Just checking. I need the number for...uh...stuff).

Comments

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm totally gonna go see the Knight Rider movie they're making!!
:-D

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh, uh oh, I might have to watch that, too...

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I didn't read all of the article but as far as I know we are not getting any new ratings. Personally, I think the fact that the MPAA, which has been rather hard-headed in the last 30 years, is willing to accept that they need to make changes having seen a documentary that outright rips into them is a good thing on basically all fronts. I think the ability to reference other films when appealing a rating is a big deal, and hopefully the MPAA will continue to revise their system.

If people don't pay attention to it, it's not the MPAA's fault.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

"It" being the rating system. If you ignore such an easy system to listen to, then that's just being stupid. And I don't mean that you have to follow it, but no matter what one says about the system, it does tell you what's in a movie and then if you're a responsible parent or moviegoer, you can still make up your own decision on whether or not to go see or allow someone else to go see a movie.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Definitely move "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" to the top of your queue. If there were any sense in the Oscar voting audience, it would win best documentary, as it's both a better film and has caused greater change than "An Inconvenient Truth".

The MPAA should just throw out the rating system, and let the task of informing parents go to private reviewers. That's what sensible parents already do.

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

Trinity, dont take this the wrong way but i think your in the wrong career. You should really consider writing editorials for a living. All your arguments, although opinionated, are well founded, and although often times written in "the heat of the moment", are often times well thought out. I say brava to you my dear. Seriously. Print some of this LJ stuff, and send it to the times, see if they are hiring for free lance work.

just a thought.
in the mean time...tangent away....i love it, i cant name how many times i have had somebody read something on your my space to help me win an argument or debate.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Seriously, because of their assinine system, a rating means nothing. The qualifiers at the bottom make more sense of the thing than the ratings do. The little capsules at the bottom of the New York Times reviews tell you more than do ratings. I wouldn't trust the ratings to tell me what's to worry about in regards to bringing minors along.

Alas, someone has to inform the parents or they'd just start complaining that they have "no way of knowing" what's in a film, despite the fact they have myriad ways. :;grinds teeth::

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words. I should find an interweb column to publish for so I don't have to take out the cursing. :)

Glad I can help you win arguments! I so rarely win any myself...

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

See, just because they're willing to change now...I dunno, it's not like they deserve a medal for that. They've been consistently off base for thirty years. Ratings need to change, adapt, and evolve with the subject matter, technical ability to portray things in movies, etc. That it took them so long to even deign to change is not heartening. It's like looking at how the current President rolls; my way or the highway...oh, unless I'm caught out in something horribly embarrasssing and/or awful, and then I'll change a little but only if I get a lot of compliments and you all do what I say.

I say they're too stodgy, too antiquated, and too out of touch. About the only part of their system that made sense to me was the clause that the people on the board had to have young children themselves (young, I'm sure, meaning living-at-home, which is a stretch enough as it is). The fact that this sensible requirement--you are now the concerned parent trying to decide what you would or wouldn't let your child see and what would or wouldn't upset him/her--got thrown by the wayside as people got rather used to getting to screen movies in advance and wouldn't give up the job? That's abuse, entitlement, and a bunch of other crap that I don't like going down and should be a major embarrassment. It got like one mention. Sheesh.

And if parents can't make sense out of what is or isn't worthy of the ratings given a film, they don't help and the parents get conditioned to assume they can't trust the ratings anyway. I don't excuse the parents in this not paying attention to the ratings, but getting confused by them seems all too easy.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

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...

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

As far as the cursing goes, dont worry about it....maybe you should see if you could start your own web site like the news according to trinity

bet you could get a following :D

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

,....but I thought that's what LJ was for! ^.~*

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

yes
but everybody on LJ knows you
with your own website it would not be limited to some rants being friends only as well as there would be a level of privacy that you dont have here where we all know who you are :D

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

hah! except I would have to advertise it. And there's the part where I'm laaaaaazy.

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

LOL tell you friends, let them tell their friends, and so on and so forth, it will spread by word of mouth, no advertising required

i mean really, how many people know lions and tigers in Kenya or the Hampster Dance...and really they never had to advertise :D

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

This is so tempting--but to reserve a website...requires skills to maintain...

[umeyard.livejournal.com]

hmm
wish i could help but honestly i am clueless :D

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I dunno where you heard that thing about male nudity. No full-frontal female nudity (just extremely brief partial nudity -- my only example being Titanic, really) made it into a few PG-13s, and I remember there being similar mumblings when George Clooney's naked ass got a PG-13 on appeal from the MPAA. I think in general people just put less male nudity in movies, which is an entirely different argument. The rule about the f-word seems to be somewhat lenient as well; while the standard rule of thumb is one for a PG-13, you can occasionally get away with two, or if you are Hollywood Homicide, then you can get away with as many as four for some reason.

In theory, the "TV system" is no better than what we have now, which is the MPAA listing what the movie is rated for underneath the rating. All they would need to do is refine it and make sure to be consistent (no more "intense depiction of very bad weather", "mild peril" or "emotional intensity", and BOTH Shaun of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead get "Zombie Violence/Gore" instead of just Shaun). I mean, the system is perhaps more precise than you believe -- an R movie can have sexuality, but for it to go in the box, the sexuality has to be what got it the R, if it is PG-13-level sexuality, then the description just says "Language" or whatever.

I think that while there is a lot of hypocrisy and political BS about the MPAA system, I think the main problem with the system itself is simply that the ratings board doesn't have enough objectivity (which I would say they solve with the ability to cite other movies, you can be biased against a hot-button movie but if the filmmaker can point out their examples in another film, then the problem is solved), and that they have a tendency to just not pay attention sometimes. If the system was more organized, it would work better.

The biggest problem, as I said before, is still in the hands of the viewer, and dumb parents who ignore the MPAA, ESRB, TV ratings system and whatever else that would point out where to draw the line isn't anyone's fault but theirs.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

Also, I think the MPAA's smartest rule is actually that they cannot tell you what you need to change to get a lower rating. I think that as long as that stays there nobody can REALLY cheat the system, because then you are basically trying to push the limits of the rating in a way that defeats the system, and that's just stupid.