Slashdot Mirror
PG-13 Rating Turns 20
Ant writes "CNN has a story about the 20 year anniversary of PG-13 and how it was created/born from two of Steven Spielberg's movies. (Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom and Gremlins)" Oh, Mola Ram and your heart-removing antics, little did you know the profound impact you would have.
I realize the importance of having a rating that differentiates between a kid's movie and one for young adults, but as a non-parent I look on it with contempt. Ever since the R rating begun to be widely enforced, studios have toned down violent films so they can still have a chance at making money from the younger market. For example: I might actually have gone to see the recent Alien vs. Predator film had it been rated R, but since it was PG-13, I decided to wait until I can rent it. Enforcement of the ratings system, and the studios' response to it, has dealt the death blow for true horror/action films, because studios must now focus on making higher quality products for a more discerning audience if they want to make profit and carry the R rating. Instead they choose to neuter their movies and add some more special effects and popular cliché to entice the kids.
I'm not suggesting that just because a movie is rated PG-13 that it is, by default, a bad movie. What I am suggesting is that continuations of previously successful films, and modern horror/action flicks will never be what we all remember them to be. We will never see truly cheesy and senselessly bloody movies like Evil Dead ever again.
Also, if anyone hasn't heard of a decent NC-17 movie since Showgirls, this one looks promising. I saw the trailer for it the other day.
Why is this "knews" piece even relevant? CNN has a pro-MPAA, pro-RIAA, Valenti puff piece every couple days. You don't see a whole lot of well-rounded copyright discourse on the major media news outlets. (Gee, I wonder why...) CNN: We're tough on music fans. We like suing kids and grandmas. We equate infringement with theft. We are fair and balanced, too.
[
Though my position on this issue probably doesn't sync with the norm, I've found the problem with PG-13 to be the exact opposite of yours. Sometimes I'd just like to see a good movie without any of the questionable junk. (I know, I know - lots of people seem to prefer to see the stuff I just called junk in their moves - I'd rather that stuff be in movies rated R though.) Movies which for the most part probably could be rated PG throw some gratuitous scene or language in just to get the coveted PG-13 rating so that the teenage crowd won't dismiss it. So, what you end up with are movies which are mostly pretty good, but have some questionable content which may or may not fit with the rest of the story or the intended audience in one small scene just to get the more mature rating. So, from my perspective, the PG-13 rating has actually worsened my movie going experience. But, I recognize I'll be hard pressed to have very many other people on Slashdot agree. Let the puritanical accusations commence!
And it could possibly be because she is hot .
You mean films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey? That's probably my all time favorite. I find that "adult" film really means adolescent film. I don't care to spend hours and hours filling my head full of blooshed and gore. There's a whole universe of stuff out there that could make for interesting films, but people are so in love with violence that that's what we get. Either that or just plain stupid, sappy stuff.
Long ago I decided to vote with my buck and just stop going to the movies.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
But then again, is that surprising.
3 308&trkid=73), rated PG-13. If it scared off people for having brief nudity (a 70-year-old man's bare ass) and sexual content (discussions about panties and what they mean on a date), then maybe Hollywood wouldn't have made such a shitty movie.
The problem is that *all* of the ratings rely on someone else telling parents what's appropriate for their children. I know, but let's pretend that parents in this country actually parent.
A better system of rating would be to rate them for launguage, violence, sexuality, etc., very similar to what many pay-cable networks use.
Google for yourself - there's plenty of outraged people out there who think that some PG-13 movies are unacceptable for 13-year-olds, but if a movies was rated for brief nudity and sexual content, we could all make that decision based on personal morals, as opposed to the nebulus PG-13.
What I think is acceptable for me and my children is wildly different from many puritanical types in America. In plus, the aforementioned movie with nudity and sexual content is called Mooseport (http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=6003
They had their chance 20 years ago for reform, and now we'll never see it.
"It's also lead to an interesting counter-trend out of Hollywood... they're now putting out the "unrated edition" DVD for movies that had to get some scenes cut to qualify for the lower MPAA rating."
It's not a "counter-trend," it's a "profit-trend." The "Unrated" label is just a ploy to sell more DVDs. "Ooh look! This is unrated, it must be full of sex and murder! I want to see what I missed in theaters!"
G
The Roman Catholic system actually tends to reflect the ideas of quality, realism, and depth (granted - all often within the limits of certain moral biases, particularly about sex).
RC censors operate under rules where they are expected to look at West Side Story, recognize that it's based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, that the musical score is a skilled orchestral work and integral to the creation as a whole, and that there's an added message about racial and class intolerance that makes a number of profound moral points, and take such things into account in rating the film, while the current US system is expected to simply notice an underage romance is involved, and tack on some standardized points. Enough points for gang violence, knives being shown, and deaths and it's PG-13, a few more and its an R, and a "message" is often irrelevant to the final result.
Who is John Cabal?
I thought this movie was great. I live in east asia (though not in Tokyo), and virtually all the expats I've met that have lived out here for a reasonable amount of time thought this movie was great, too.
The director -- Sophia Coppola was it? -- apparently lived in Tokyo for sometime, and used her experiences when making the movie. Whatever it was, it really shines through. No matter how enculturated you become (for example, I've lived in Shanghai for years now, speak Chinese, and am possibly now more comfortable with Chinese culture than the one I was born with), there are always these hopeless times where you realize that no amount of xenophelia will ever make you fit in, and that you will always be an outsider, if only because of your race.
Lost in Translation captures this feeling of hopelessness in such an incredibly poetic way.
Most of the people I've discussed this movie with that didn't like it (and sibling posts bear this out) seem to be mostly concerned with the fact that the film has the slow pace of real life rather than the accelerated pace of Hollywood blockbusters. It's really much more like a French film than an American one, I think, in terms of pace and style.
If you're not into that sort of thing, well... what can I tell you?
But understand that you are probably not the intended audience of this movie. It's about culture shock, and if you haven't experienced culture shock, you probably aren't going to identify with it.
Good movies are coming out at an alarming rate. In fact, I would say that for the first time since the 60s it is now possible to go to a mainstream cinema and have a high chance of finding a real grownup movie on. Even wide-appeal movies like the Kill Bill movies, Lost in Translation and so on are grown up in the way that 80's movies never were. We have more 'pure art' movies available than ever before, now that Japanese, Chinese and Korean movies are finally actually being shown on screens (admittedly only in big cities). And even the summer blockbusters, lowest of the low in pure trash terms, sometimes contain depths (LoTR, Spiderman, pity about Troy though) that nobody would have dreamed of bothering to add in in the 1980s.
What's more, from a technical point of view there has never been a greater reserve of knowhow and skilled professionals available. Even a flop like Van Helsing was able to call on cinematography that was really a work of art in it's own right.
You want Real Art? The usual suspects are doing it: Talk To Her, Dolls. Hollywood's doing it too: The Others, Donnie Darko. But even if you don't want Real Art, the average quality of every grade of movie has moved up SO far since 20 years ago...
The movies are not dying. Watch a week's worth of multiscreen fodder from 1984 and you will agree with me!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Holy crap! It got an American R? What for?
Lies.