MPAA System: Should it be changed?

oops the link might not work but the report is called "G is for Golden" if you want to look it up

Duh, it means the film has themes. I mean, maybe you're the kind of person who would expose a child viewer to a theme, but that's between you and your god.

That is excellent.

Hee!

If a guide is empty I will sometimes put stuff in it, especially if it's more sensitive content like a child being abused or graphic violence. The biggest struggle is trying to describe things accurately but in the least spoiler-y way possible.

One movie I am surprises is rated NC-17 is Kids (1995). If the movie were rated PG-13, teenagers would be way too scared to have unprotected sex and do drugs after watching that movie.

But I guess American culture doesn't want to put fear into teens like that, even if it's good fear so all the cautionary tale movies like that will get higher adult ratings?

I think the problem is that the industry would be afraid that any film labeled "A" for Adult would cause a big portion of the audience to skip such a film, likely thinking it would be too stodgy.

A recent film which would be considered "A" in such a rating would be The Father. That film is probably not of much interest to the under 30 crowd.

At any rate, it's an interesting subject, but the industry refused to consider the "A" rating in the '80s when Siskel and Ebert were pushing for it, and they're not going to consider it now.

That's what I am referring to. Way back when, it was a very narrow view of American life that decided, e.g., that The Birth of a Nation is fine as long as there was no nudity and that the most scandalous thing that happened in Gone With the Wind was when Rhett Butler said "damn". If a writer or director is going to have much in the way of plot conflict in a movie, it's hard to find, for example, a villain that won't offend somebody because of a stereotype. Villains are hard to create and everybody wants to have the hero come from their particular demographic slice, but without heroes and villains, there's not much to the story so the construction of a plot is a minefield that requires some calculations....who DO I offend. Monsters and dinosaurs are easy, but not so much any human group.

I'm not even disagreeing with that intention, but it IS hard to figure out how to have conflict without a stereotype of a villain, especially in an art form where you have a few seconds to suggest to the audience what a person's character is. It's also difficult because, the more you humanize a character with additional plot development, the harder it is to see them as a pure villain, doing evil because they are evil.

In older movies, there was a set of assumptions about values and culture that often went unchallenged, but the broader we get in our views about culture, the harder it is to use a simple equation like German = Nazi and Nazi = Evil, ergo, conspicuous German = Evil, an example of the the character devices that movies have used since their beginning.

I'm really glad that we can have the horses fall digitally now and don't use the tripwires.

Children have personal devices that are a constant portal to gore, porn, and every extreme idea. The MPAA simply isn't relevant when kids are getting Clock Work Orange-ed by their phones. Keeping kids from entering physical theaters in the age of Netflix is pointless.

A couple people have said this already but yes, the 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated is a great source of all the MPAA's problems. If it were up to me I'd say we should adapt the British film rating system (G, PG, 12, 12A, 15, 18)

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I agree that filmmakers now have to take into account a wider range of value sets when making a film.

One demographic will be offended by "taking the Lord's name in vain", while another demographic will be more offended by a homophobic slur.

That's why I appreciate an objective description of content, because you can be an informed consumer and not rely on someone else putting a rating on something that might not align with your feelings.

I think that the main thing about a villain is just giving them a personality. People will get called out for throwing lazy characterizations on screen, and (as per our discussion in the other thread about stereotypes), I actually think that's fine. I'm not sure that many interesting stories call for a "purely evil" villain.