It's depressing how the MPAA's movie rating system is downplaying the inappropriateness of violence, blood and gore and at the same time raising that of nudity. If I had kids that I knew of, I'd sure as hell rather have them look at a pair of breasts than have them watch a man being disembowled [entertaining as it may be]. Yet, the movie 'Team America' got the notorious NC-17 rating for having a puppet sex scene, while dozens of gory death scenes slid by without question. Trey Parker, director of Team America, creator of South Park, and god among men, says that "We blow Janeane Garafolo's head clean off, but it's all about the positions of the puppets having sex...it's not funny, it's tragic."
This rant is less about movies, but more about the values people today have. A memorable example of the disarray of American morals is the 38th Super-Bowl.
Ah, America at it's best. At any rate, I didn't bring this up to make fun of moronic football fans. Something bigger happened at this Super Bowl. Heh. Well, somewhat bigger.
Janet Jackson, while performing onstage, started getting closer and closer to co-star Justin Timberlake. Before the American public knew what hit them,
Bam. Nipple. After the initial wardrobe malfunction, news stations and pre-teens worldwide lit up with discussion. All any news channel covered for upwards of two weeks was that same damned two-second clip, just with different styles of blur effects. Concerned inattentive parents across the nation voiced their disapproval of the harrowing disaster of the Super Bowl, and how it had forever scarred any children that were unfortunate enough to witness this C-cupped blasphemy [a total of 540,000 complaints].
I have a question to ask: Had Janet Jackson exploded onstage, would anyone have been offended?
No. There would be an immediate reaction of confusion and scientific debate, admittedly, but the subject would be dropped rather quickly as the explosion footage lost it's originality and people were no longer entertained and moved on. Would any one person call in to complain that Janet Jackson exploded? I think not.
In light of all of this, I am now compelled to introduce my own rating system:
Yes...the SPDNIC system. Movies will be given a letter code if any of these apply to them. For example, common horror films will be coded SPN. Typical 'skater' films will be coded PDI. Football dramas will be coded III, or simply, 3. Follow? Good. Appendix After writing this article, I recieved mixed reviews on my take of the movie rating system. Surprisingly, most thought I was right. At any rate, one comment in particular inspired me to add an appendix to this piece. "Cheya, you're movie rating system is good and all, but it fails to address movies with dirty jokes or bad influences, behavior and role models." To this, I replied, "You know what...I changed my mind. Kids suck. They shouldn't see movies. They always wind up incessantly quoting lame-assed catchphrases or hurting themselves or someone else because they 'saw it in the movies'. All movies are bad influences solely because children are dumbfucks. They need to learn to differentiate between reality and fantasy...which is probably why online role-playing games are all the rage these days. They don't get that it's just a fucking video game. God, I hate gamers...wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right. I hate kids, too. Damn them and their greed, innocence, malleability and blissful, blissful ignorance...who wants burritos?" Conversations with me often go that way. --- |
