JJ Vincent wonders about the relevance of the MPAA’s movie rating system. Do you think it matters anymore?
Recently, I was watching the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which tries to pull back some of the secrecy behind how movies are rated. PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. The message boiled down to this: you can show this much blood or this many breasts and get a PG-13, but not say this word more than 2 times, or this many guns and no blood and lady’s rear end but not a man’s, or if you take these two seconds out you can have an R and not an NC-17, or maybe not, depends on..well, we can’t tell you.
THIS SPACE LEFT BLANK BECAUSE THE VIDEO FOR THE TRAILER FOR THE MOVIE IS ONLY AVAILABLE BY LINK
It’s a sharp look into these questions: who decides what gets what ratings, and how relevant are ratings any more? With nearly anything available on-demand on phone, tablets, computers, TVs, with movie theaters with varying levels of enforcement, with parental and school controls easily overcome, and with what is visible and available on TV and cable 24/7, how important is a ratings system?
How much do they guide parents and protect children, have they just become a tool for marketing and publicity or a tool to restrict it, or have they outlived their usefulness?
Opinions welcome!
America is the land of the free and freedom of speech is enshrined in the constitution.
It seems odd that it would also have a private body that censors movies…