August 30, 2004

• Meredithea: I apologize ahead of time for the threadjack. Does anyone want a GMail invite? They keep giving them to me and I ran out of people I know who want one. However, to actually remaing somewhat ontopic: When I was a kid I never really understood the difference between PG and PG-13. As far as I could tell, it was a different name for the same rating. That viewpoint hasn't changed much, to be honest.
• It was interesting to read about how PG-13 was created. I get so tired of parents who are upset after they have taken their kids to a movie they didn't do enough research on. My mum would preview anything PG and up - and guess what? We didn't see Gremlins when it first came out (I was 7). But the parents who are the most vocal about protecting their children also seem to be the most lazy and expect the industry to do their job for them. That said, a friend has just shown me Cap Alert, the Fundie guide to movies for kids. Apparently, everything that makes a movie interesting, like magic, or slight amounts of danger, is evil.
• PG-13 has neutered cinema. Really. It causes filmmakers to hold back in order to not pass into the R zone. The producers pushing for the lower ratings has caused a chilling effect on directors and screenwriters, who self-censor their work in order to meet the elusive PG-13 standard.
• This is really interesting to me. Here in Canada, the system is slightly different, and varies by province (each province has their own review board.) Where I am in Ontario we have 14A (which means adult accompaniment is required if the child is under 14; in Manitoba the age is 15) instead of PG-13, but it tends to be the same rating. However, things are sometimes much lower rated here. For example, the article cited I Robot as a PG-13 film, while it was only PG here. However, I was really disappointed by that PG rating - I found it to be really very violent, especially if we were to empathize with the robots (as was the intent of the movie, I felt). As said above, the best method is to check what you are going to see beforehand. Quebec has an even more interesting system, with 12+, 16+, and 18+ ratings. Speaking of Quebec, my mom told me a very interesting story on this very topic yesterday - when she was growing up in Montreal, children under 16 were not allowed in cinemas, period, except for very special events, where they had to be with their parents. It appears to have been an attempt by the Catholic church to regulate movie watching in general in the province; a fire at a movie theatre with many deaths also helped allow the law. The topic arose because I was telling my mom about a restaurant we ate at this weekend, which was under the Rialto - and she said "oh yes, that`s where my girlfriends and I used to go when we were 14 to see movies, because they didn`t check ID there." Goes to show that the regulations didn`t really work, and further shows to me that it`s all a crapshoot anyway.
• I side with shawnj here. jb's point about lazy parenting applies, too. When my youngest son was 10 or 11, he stayed with a friend's family for a weekend, and the boys were allowed to watch some soft-core porn film by the moron Dad. When I questioned the parents about it, they were very defensive, and the Dad had the nerve to say that "seeing some tits is good for boys their age." I'm no prude. What I objected to is not the nudity, but the neanderthal attitude displayed by men toward women in the film, which was picked up in minutes by my son, and he related that to me. I certainly don't want my kids growing up sexist or misogynist in any way. As for ratings, we lived in a one-theatre town when the kids were young, so most of our movies were seen on tv or as rentals. We'd let the kids watch anything we did, and if it had scenes we found disturbing or challenging, we'd talk about them. Eventually the kids all figured out that movie depictions do not generally accurately depict real life, and that they should take everything they saw on screen with a grain of salt. We'd also let them choose rentals (I think we mostly balked at wasting time and money on obvious crap), and didn't censor their choices (they had sense enough not to want to see t&a flicks). People can't expect movie studios and review boards to do their parenting for them. Take responsibility for the lives you've created, do your best to see to it that they get balanced exposure to all sorts of media, and don't flinch or shy away from explaining concepts, ideas and images that you find to be offensive or inappropriate. Kids are much more intelligent than their parents credit them, and avoiding or banning issues and topics just makes them all the more desirable.
• My parents used about the same strategy, coppermac. I could watch anything I wanted, as long as they were there to answer questions. Their only across-the-board "No!" was to horror movies -- they didn't want me sleeping with them for the next week! Personally, I think that the PG-13 rating leads to bland "family friendly" action movies. I'm not saying that more violence automatically = better movie, but all too often I find that anything novel and unique tends to lead to the big bad R, so filmmakers try to play it safe.
• Did any else see "The Ring"? Now there's a movie that almost should have been rated higher. I can just imagine some thirteen year-old seeing it and never sleeping again. The rating system seems off. The Southpark Movie was almost NC-17 for language. Violence is okay language isn't. Stupid system. I'll admit I was suprised the first time I saw Titanic though. Seems like over here anything having to do with the body is automatically adult as a general rule.
• Oh, of course. It's much worse to see someone naked than to see them get their head chopped off, in their broken logic. Hollywood would rather see flaming babies than a penis any day. (Ok, maybe a *slight* exaggeration, but not much.)
• it's an Unpublican culture of fear, i tells ya.
• Cultural hysterias like that are interesting to me. I didn't even notice them until I was reading a mailing list with some French and US members, when a hubbub broke out after the US folks assumed that sexual content on the list meant that fairly strong violence was okay too. (F: "What are you DOING? Yhis is supposed to be at least somewhat all-ages." U: "You just had half-naked chicks singing about oral sex." F: "So? This is violence. It's different." And then a lesson for all on censorship and cultural differences.) One could blow hot air about it from now until doomsday, but I just find it odd and interesting in that "we're all crazy in different ways" sort of way.