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.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
First, I must say that I am a huge fan of these books. For anyone else that is a Hitchhikers fan, that provides some frame of reference, for those who are not fans, let me explain.
With each type of media that the story has been delivered in, from the radio series, to the television series, the books and now the movies, there are differences depending on what the author, Douglas Adams, felt that he wanted to get across at that particular moment in time. From the interviews and articles that I have read, it seems that he had many different possible plot lines and outcomes from the whole story, but the core of the story always remains intact.
So for me the books are my favorite version of the story.
