Rated PG… Yeah, Right

Jun 3, 2005 by  

I know it’s not the type of movie I usually cover here, but if there are any parents reading this who are thinking of taking their under-10 year olds to see the PG rated Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, please read the following from a ScreenIt.com review:

Rated PG, the film contains a handful of mild expletives; some non-explicit, but sexually related dialogue; one teen who sexually pursues her soccer coach nonstop until he finally can’t resist anymore and they apparently have sex (off-camera, after some making out, and she feels empty afterwards)…

Gone are the days when you could just assume that a PG-rated movie is OK without doing any further research. I really believe that at some point parents will have to screen even G-rated movies before taking their kids to see them.

And whose fault is this? No, I don’t just lay the blame at the foot of the studios, but it rests with the film ratings board. From FilmRatings.com:

Who gives movies their ratings?

Parents give the movies their ratings-men and women just like you. They are part of a specially designed committee called the film rating board of the Classification and Rating Administration. As a group they view each film and, after a group discussion, vote on its rating, making an educated estimate as to which rating most American parents would consider the most appropriate.

Ok, fine. Sounds good so far… although I still don’t understand how the envelope continues to be pushed first on PG-13 films, and now apparently on PG films as well.

After further investigation:

The ratings are decided by a full-time Rating Board located in Los Angeles. There are 8-13 members of the Board who serve for perods of varying length.

Oh! Now it all makes sense! With apologies to parents in the state of California who are trying to raise their kids right, could the MPAA find a location from which to select a group of parents that could be less in touch with the rest of the country?

I suppose they could have assembled a group from the San Francisco Bay Area…

Here’s a suggestion: How about a group assembled from parents across the country? Figure out a way to do it… just send out screeners and then do a conference call. IMO that would get you a more representative cross section of parents countrywide.

Something needs to be changed, because the ratings system is obviously not working any more.

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One Comment - Comments are closed.

  1. Brian    6 years ago

    Great observation… most of us (including myself) don’t usually think about how movies end up with the ratings they do.

    Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park) had something to say about the MPAA back in 1999 with regards to their movie Bigger, Longer and Uncut:

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    According to Stone, he and Parker got angry at each MPAA suggestion for cuts or changes during post-production.

    “Then we’d cool off for a day and write something. We’d replace that joke with something that was much, much worse, much longer, much more gratuitous, just because we hate the MPAA,” recalls Stone. “And they’d have to watch it. It’s a kind of big middle finger to ‘you.’”

    To their surprise, the censors often approved the new versions of jokes and scenes.

    “The MPAA single-handedly made this movie much dirtier than it was,” Stone brags. “There is no director’s cut because we feel that this is the dirtiest and funniest and most outrageous version.”

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    Brian