Rating the Raters
by Mad Dog

   Music is rated too. Some CDs come with a Parental Advisory label, which isn’t really a warning, it’s an enticement for kids to buy it. Though it just says “Explicit Content,” what it should say is “If by some miracle you were able to understand these lyrics you wouldn’t want your children to be listening to them.” This warning comes courtesy of the RIAA, the same record industry trade group which issues subpoenas to 12-year-olds for downloading music. Come to think of it, we’d better start heeding those advisory labels if we know what’s good for us.

   Video games are also rated, and with content descriptions which are much better than those used by movies and record companies. They use descriptors such as Animated Blood, Crude Humor, and Informational, the latter being the strongest warning you could have if you want to stop a kid from ever wanting to play a video game. If they want to make sure kids will never play it, they should add Educational, Good For You, and Your Parents Like It to the list.

   Rating is an arbitrary thing. Take movies for example. It’s hard to figure out why some movies get the rating they do. In general, sex is bad while violence is okay. This is just like real life where it’s okay to get into a fight, but you’d better keep your knickers on, dammit. Out of 70 films listed at the MPAA’s rating web site (www.filmratings.com) as having received the dreaded NC-17 rating, only three mention violence as a reason. Showgirls received two ratings, an NC-17 and an R. Both ratings mention a lot about sex but neither lists the main reason—torture. No, there wasn’t a torture scene in the movie that you missed because you fell asleep, it was torture watching it.

   Recently, Kill Bill, the Quentin Tarrantino movie with as many killings as minutes of run time, got an R rating, meaning children under 17 are allowed in as long as they’re accompanied by a parent, guardian, or fake ID. The San Francisco Chronicle elaborated on the rating by saying, “It has shootings, stabbings, beatings, beheadings, disembowelings, amputations, mutilations, eye-gouging, slicings, choppings, bitings and a spanking. Also some naughty words.” Actually I think the Chronicle was just having fun. After all, that paragraph was lifted word for word from an old Veg-a-matic commercial, except they left out the line about slicing unripe tomatoes.
 

   Pulp Fiction, which also got an R rating, actually had more obscenities than South Park—411 to be exact—but it’s twice as long, which is why it only has a PPM of 2.66. When the extended director’s cut of South Park: Biggest, Longest & Completely Uncut is released, I feel confident it will have as many as 798 nasty words, which is even more than will be recorded on a typical December morning when the doors open at Toys R Us and 3,645 mothers find out there were only two of this year’s Toy-to-Have and the manager and security guard already snapped them up.

   There’s a need for a new movie rating category: TF. It doesn’t stand for Too Frightening or Terribly Filmed, it stands for Tempting Fate, and Mel Gibson’s upcoming movie, The Passion of Christ, should receive this rating. During the filming the actor playing Jesus Christ was struck by lightning not once, but twice. The first time, lightning struck his umbrella, causing light burns to the tips of his fingers. A few months later he was again carrying an umbrella when he was struck, this time winding up with smoke coming out of his ear. Gibson continued filming anyway. This in spite of the fact that it came from a higher power than the RIAA, MPAA, or Internet Content Rating Association. It’s enough to make me think twice before seeing this movie. And after all, isn’t that what a rating label is about?

©2003 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read the ones rated G only.