Author Topic: MPAA  (Read 341 times)

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Re: MPAA
« on: September 03, 2012, 03:10:46 pm »
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Whoever wins this election, we’re in the middle of a changeover from conservative to liberal values. While right-wing politicians battle to ban gay marriage, most Americans are perfectly okay with gays getting married. The social pendulum has swung back to progressive and permissive; there are shows on television today that push the boundaries of what could even be shown in R-rated films. I’d love to see what an episode of The Walking Dead gets rated by the MPAA, to be honest, or Game of Thrones. The internet has also impacted our cultural permissiveness. It’s hard to keep kids away from risque or pornographic material. When I was 12 getting a **** movie was a major accomplishment; in 2012 it just means getting on a computer without web filtering software.

But while the cultural mores change, the small-minded censors remain, and they will only get louder in the coming years. They take turns going after music and video games and comic books and movies, and with the Aurora shooting and more films butting against the NC-17 - Blue Valentine had to fight an NC-17 for an oral sex scene - it seems likely that movies could be getting their turn back on the front lines of the culture wars.

Which is why I don’t want to destroy the MPAA’s ratings system. As stupid as the ratings are, and as stupid as the Code was, it has successfully kept the movie industry free of government censorship. Call me paranoid, but I do not believe that we’re out of those woods yet, and I like the idea of industry self-regulation.

But the system as it stands is so broken that it will only invite anger from conservatives and religious groups (side note: until 2007 any movie that espoused a religious doctrine automatically got a PG rating. That seems pretty reasonable to me - I’m more worried about kids being exposed to religious dogma at a young age than a tit. But after the film Facing The Giants earned a PG rating evangelical groups complained and started a letter-writing campaign. The MPAA has said they would no longer take religious doctrine into mind when assigning ratings - a huge mistake on their part). And it’s broken in a fundamental artistic way, where films are funneled towards the childish PG-13 and more mature ideas get left behind.

The NC-17 proved that trying to fix one part of the system doesn’t work. The world simply sees NC-17 as an artier X. Any replacement rating - be it A for Adult or M for Mature or whatever - will be seen the same way. So the entire ratings system has to be overhauled from the bottom - rebooted, if you will.

Here’s how I would recreate the ratings system:

E - Everyone. This would replace the G rating. It’s not much of a rating, as G movies are essentially death (even animated films try to get PGs so as to not seem too much like movies for babies), but changing the lowest rating signifies a shake-up of the whole system.
PG - Parental Guidance Suggested. Let’s keep this old standby.
T - Teen. Replace the PG-13 with this rating, lifted from comics and video games.
R-15 - Restricted - No one under 15 without parent or guardian. Here’s where we make the big changes. This rating applies to the softer R movies, the movies like last year’s documentary Bully or this year’s The Dark Knight Rises. These are films with some violence and sex and language, but not terribly much more than you would see in an evening’s AMC TV viewing. I think the MPAA needs to give up on the language stuff, so this rating would have all your **** and everything.
R - Restricted- No one under 17. And now we have a top of the line adults rating that still has the same name as the old rating. Shame would be R. 300 would be R. Saw would be R. NC-17 goes away, we’ve created a middle ground for less explicit, less heavy movies, and now movie studios can make films for adults without worrying about stigma.

 The actual ratings aren’t the only problems in the MPAA ratings system; there’s the secrecy, which doesn’t help filmmakers understand what it is about their movie that gets a certain rating. There’s also the big studios’ desire to homogenize everything down to the most box office friendly rating. But I think a top-to-bottom overhaul is overdue, and it could only improve things for the MPAA and Hollywood.

Looking back at the Pre-Code era you see some of the best movies ever made. The reason is simple: restrictions enhance creativity. The filmmakers of the time were playfully dancing around the Hays Code and coming up with great films, as well as new genres. Screwball comedies and the gangster film both grew up out of that. Noir was shaped by the restrictions of the Breen Office. I’m against censorship, but I do like the idea of filmmakers having to consider the best way to present their material within a structure - it leads to creativity.

But I also like filmmakers being able to make whatever movies they want, and to present whatever material they want. I think that my revised ratings system allows for both - a more nuanced teen-oriented set of ratings gives the right kinds of restrictions while the adult-oriented R rating allows for exploration of headier, sexier, deeper themes without worrying about the morality police pissing their pants.

* They got the idea from Major League Baseball, who was dealing with the fallout of the 1919 White Sox scandal by hiring an outside to be ‘League Commissioner.’

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