"What does the MPAA do right?"
The Onion Av Club's film critics Noel Murray and Scott Tobias discuss the pros and cons of the MPAA's Ratings Board.
Scott Tobias in particular beautifully articulates the problems with the NC-17 Rating and the Rating's System as a whole. For example:
"At bottom, I think the MPAA supports a set of values—permissive about violence, puritanical about sex, viciously anti-gay (ever wonder why a Lifetime-ready movie like Longtime Companion got an R?)—that's completely perverse and in need of radical retooling."
Wondering what the MPAA has gotten right himself,
James "Is My Blog Really PG?" Comtois
Labels: film, of interest
posted by Jamespeak at 1:09 PM
2 Comments:
I've only skimmed through the discussion thus far, but I couldn't find a mention of the hardworking folks over at screenit.com, who are providing an extraordinary alternative to the MPAA. Check it out if you haven't seen it. They take a movie and basically itemize every possible objectionable moment in a (sometimes inadvertently hilarious) neutral tone not inflected by any particular moral perspective.
It's infinitely more informative than the MPAA rating, and very effectively draws distinctions between a movie like "Once" and a movie like "Hostel Part 2." There's a lot of free content, but I encourage people to become members because it seems to me to promote a more nuanced system of evaluating the potentially offensive content in movies.
The site http://www.kids-in-mind.com/ also does a pretty good job explaining in detail what is in a movie (in terms of sex, language and violence). I'm actually with Scott that there's something inherently flawed with the NC-17 rating that may be unfixable (not even Roger Ebert's proposed "A" Rating can fix it).
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