The Freedomist
“Is the PG-13 rating helping or hurting families?” That’s the question I posed in an article published in Plugged In magazine in the summer of 2001. The answer seemed pretty obvious even then. But after watching two recent movies featuring heroes from the Marvel Comics universe, I’m more convinced than ever that this baffling rating serves Hollywood a lot better than it serves the rest of us.
For one thing, the vast majority of PG-13 movies are totally inappropriate for the average seventh grader. Why use 13 as the cutoff for features whose content strays perilously close to an R? Many of these films test boundaries. They look for loopholes. They play the ratings game with the Motion Picture Association of America in order to be as racy as possible without getting the R and limiting their profitability.
Take the superhero mutant prequel X-Men: First Class. It’s quite violent in places and racks up a significant body count, but the fatalities are shot strategically in order to comply with the MPAA’s acceptable limits. Similarly, frontal female nudity and a scene in which a man gropes the barely dressed woman straddling him on a bed would normally cost a film its PG-13. Not here. The makers of X-Men have found creative ways to be provocative without sacrificing their desired rating. They also get maximum pop out of an f-word, as permitted by the MPAA in a PG-13. In short, this otherwise compelling film gets torpedoed by gratuitous content.
Article Source: http://www.focusonlinecommunities.com/blogs/pluggedin/2011/06/09/marveling-at-a-one-rating-world
Written by staffwriter
Filed under: Articles, Family Movies, Headlines
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