Let’s replace the MPAA’s ratings board!
I watched a movie last night called “This film is not yet rated”. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do. It is a documentary about the MPAA’s ratings system, the ratings board, and the ratings appeal board. It is all incredibly interesting, and you will be surprised what you don’t know about how films are rated. This movie is available at NetFlix.
Although I don’t have any proof myself, the film indicated that if a movie were to receive the NC-17 rating (which is a replacement for the X rating) they could loose millions of dollars. The bigger impact, which probably relates to the money loss is that the movie will not get to as large an audience as PG-13 or R rated movie as many places won’t show NC-17 movies. So there is big money involved in the ratings system as it is today.
One of the things that stands out the most to me was the fact that the ratings board does not have a defined set of standards for rating movies. What is basically amounts to is a room full of anonymous individuals making spot judgments on what they see or think they see on the screen. According to the MPAA website, they have a list of what the ratings mean, but in the movie the examples given indicated that there is far more individual judgment applied by the ratings board. It seems that films from the big studios get far more leeway and feedback then films produced independently.
Why not have a system where there is a clear list of criteria that a movie is objectively judged by? That way anyone can take the list and see exactly how the rating was applied to the movie. If you were to couple that with a brief synopsis of the content of the movie I think that parents would have a better way of determining if they want their children to see the movie, which is supposed to be what the ratings are all about. Even this is questioned by the film, as it seems that there are far more implications tied to a films rating than just protecting children.
Another thing that really struck me was the way that sex and violence are rated. I watch plenty of movies, and I can certainly tell that violent content is far more prevalent than sex. To me that seems strange. Here we are in a society where you are constantly barraged with images of violence and you hear about how we, and our children are more and more desensitized to it. If you are religious, then violence is a sin, and so is sex. So then why are violence and violent situations rated far more lightly then scenes involving sex?
Why do we still use the MPAA to rate our movies? Why doesn’t someone create an independent ratings system that has well documented and objective criteria with which they can apply a rating to a movie? Why is sex worse for children to see than violence?
The film itself is rated NC-17 by the MPAA, which is mostly due to the fact that they show and compare scenes in the film that have been rated NC-17. However these scenes perfectly illustrate the inconsistencies in the ratings system. See it and judge for yourself.
Full of bells and whistles
I’m watching a show on the Discovery channel about cars in the future. It’s a fairly good show. Then I hear it, this engineer type says something about the car filling with all the “bells and whistles”.
So, this gets me thinking. Most little sayings like that come from the past. Exactly how long ago was it, and what item would have been augmented by the addition of bells and whistles? Since this guy was talking about cars, let’s say that it is from the early 1900’s. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t remember seeing any Model-T’s with bells or whistles.
They had horns.
But maybe that is the point, the Model-T didn’t have all the bells and whistles. So it had to be something else that early in the 1900’s that had an extensive list of bells and whistles as optional equipment.
I think fire trucks had, and still have at least one bell, but that to be would not be all the bells, and maybe the men on the truck had whistles, but not all the whistles.
Is that fur really fake?
An article at The Conservative Voice highlights a problem where fur on coats that is labeled as faux may actually be dog fur. I think this is a bad deal, since you should be getting what is indicated on the label. But that is only one issue that the article raises.
Some may consider the bigger issue to be that the fur came from a domesticated animal. The article indicates that since 2000 it’s been illegal to import fur that comes from domesticated dogs or cats. I suppose that they had to be that specific because we don’t consider it bad in the US to use fur from other domesticated animals, we just don’t want it to be made from our pets.
Personally, I would not want to wear dog fur either, but I have no problem wearing leather that came from a cow. It just goes to show the kind of bond that we attach to our pets. There are some pets that can transcend the friend/clothing barrier, but they are all the less common types of pets such as snakes and pigs. This does not even go into species that can transcend the friend/food barrier, but I think that some people may consider a chicken a pet, and then there is the wonder animal the pig who seems to be able to fulfill our every companionship/clothing/food need.
Two Clowns Shot
Seems that I am not the only person in the world who thinks that clowns are terrifying and evil. Now if someone could just do something about mimes, of course you would have to use a silencer.
