This Film Is Not Yet Rated

I've been meaning for a while now to rant about the movie rating system. I've mentioned my dislike of it before, but I think this article sums it up fairly well. But it does require a few additional comments.

The line between G and PG seems very arbitrary. A comparison I think I've made before is between a movie like The Lion King, and a movie like Over the Hedge. One deals with regicide, family betrayal, and a villain with a scene reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The other deals with animals stealing food in the suburbs, and evil exterminator, and a bear who wants it's food back by the end of winter. Now you tell me which should be G and which should be PG. And don't even get me started on Ben-Hur, or any number of older movies.

Then there's the R rating, which is most of what the article deals with. It encompasses everything from violence to sex to torture to nudity. Honestly, with what I've seen in R, I can't figure out how NC-17 is necessary.

My sophomore year in high school I illegally went to see an R rated movie. While I still would have gone to see it without parental guidance had I known it was R, I honestly thought that it was PG-13. There was no sex, nudity, or torture. There was some violence, but it was pretty much what you could see on televison at any time (although way cooler looking). The movie was The Matrix, and I was amazed to find out that it was rated R. I still am. How a movie like that, and slasher/torture movies like Saw and Hostel can be rated the same thing, I have no idea.

So I have to agree with the writer of the article; it seems like a good idea to get rid of all ratings, and provide detailed information for parents that actually want to enforce what their kids see. Of course, there are parents out there who take their 4 year olds to see The Two Towers, so there are definitely parents out there who lack the decision making capabilities to moniter what their kids watch. But it's not like they're going to do any worse than the rating system already does.