Pardon me for getting long-winded again here.
sniffles said:
Have a bad experience at the movies lately, Funny Hat?
Nope. Just despise ingnorant and irresponsible parents, as well as the kind of stupidity that productes the ratings systems we have in this country.
Actually, I think some of the blame here should lie with the theatres that don't enforce the ratings. How many times have any of us been asked for ID when enterting a theatre? The staff just take your money and hand you a ticket. They don't ask if you're old enough to be escorting that minor into the theatre, and they don't refuse to admit people with children to from NC-17 movies. The rating system is meaningless if no one applies it.
Or is it that noone applies it because it's meaningless? What is the penalty for allowing a 16 year old into an NC-17 movie? There ISN'T one. It simply isn't up to the theatre to restrict your entry into the movie because of the ratings. The ratings don't work that way. The only way a situation like that can get you in legal trouble is letting underage kids into X-rated movies but that's not because of the ratings - it's because of providing minors access to pornography.
If you go look into the MPAA website you'll see that the purpose of the ratings is supposed to be strictly informational. It's ONLY meant to provide PARENTS with guidance on the appropriateness of the content of a film for their children. If you're an adult who is not responsible for children the ratings are effectively meaningless. Even so, the system is entirely voluntary on the part of the studios and they are under no legal requirement to submit their films to the ratings board. The ratings board are not censors. What they are is a group of 14-18 individuals who are subject to their own standards of what's appropriate. They vote on ratings by simple majority.
Given the incredibly simplistic categories of the current ratings system it's no wonder that their apparant standards of appropriateness swing wildly. Take the case of the South Park movie. It was originally given an NC-17 rating and told they'd have to remove some things to get a lower rating. According to the makers of the film they instead put even MORE "offensive" material in and when resubmitted it earned an R. Movies are recut and resubmitted to earn lower ratings for only one reason - more parents will take their children or allow them to see movies with content supposedly more appropriate for a wider, younger audience. That is, they want lower MPAA ratings to make more money.
But the ratings don't seperate out elements of language, nudity, violence - the ratings don't enable them to be specific. The result is that the individual elements aren't generally why a film earns a given rating. The ratings are decided with the content taken as a whole because there is no PG-V (for violence) or R-NL (for nudity/language) rating. Although IF YOU LOOK, you can find reviews that will indicate WHY a film was given a particular rating, but the rating itself does not. So what you've got is a ratings system that is less than informative and a public that doesn't really understand the how/why of the ratings, puts far too much faith in the ratings as a result, or else largely ignore the ratings anyway.
That means that the problem is both ignorant, irresponsible parents and a very bad rating system.
It kinda seems like there might now be some changes in store for ratings not just of movies but music and games too because of this stupid
Grand Theft Auto lawsuit. Those changes are not likely to be too good for ANYBODY because it's going to result in GOVERNEMENT involvement, which frankly is VASTLY worse than 14 yr olds playing the "hidden" nudie version of GTA:SA
That's the way it USED to be anyway, but there's been a shift so that men are required to be buff. I don't mind looking at hot male bodies, but to me the looks of the actors come after the plot, storyline, and effects of the film. <snip>
