Word: mpaa
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...strongest in exposing the capriciousness of the standards for judging movies. "There was no rater-training process," Jay Landers, a former member, tells Dick. "People were hired, they were put into the screening room, put into the rating chair and started rating films." Further, those who challenge the MPAA rating for a particular film are not allowed to cite movies with similar scenes that got a milder rating. "It's not like a legal proceeding where you can quote precedent," says Wayne Kramer, director of The Cooler. The legal equivalent to this strange rule would be that every plaintiff...
...difference between watching a video game in the basement and making an untimely visit to your parents' bedroom. For most American children, sex education begins just before puberty, but violence they can get from infancy in Tom and Jerry pain-fests on the Cartoon Network. Whatever the MPAA's argument, their raters must believe that kiss-kiss is more toxic than bang-bang, since four times as many films are rated NC17 for sex as for violence...
...limited, unrated release in the States.) Y tu mama tambien, Alfonso Cuaron's Mexican comedy-drama about two teenage boys and the slightly older woman they take on a jaunt, could be seen by 12-year-olds in France but was forbidden to under-18s by the MPAA...
...Conversely, foreign ratings boards are tougher on the most extravagant forms of movie violence, to which the MPAA board is so famously indulgent. In Britain, Germany, Ireland, Finland, Hong Kong, the Philippines and most of Canada, someone under 18 couldn't see, say, Saw, the grisly horror film that was rated R in the U.S. There are dozen of similar examples. The foreign boards obviously think they're protecting kids from traumatic images. But if you were to ask Hollywood distributors not to show splatter movies to kids, they'd probably squawk, "But that's our main audience...
...Dick discovered many of the MPAA system's anomalies when he submitted This Film Is Not Yet Rated to the board. I would love to have been a bug (or a hidden camera) on the wall of the screening room as the members watched this expose of their methods and themselves. To no one's surprise, including Dick's, the film received an NC-17 rating. When he questioned board chair Joan Graves about her group's decision, she deflected matters of political embarrassment and simply told him the film got its rating for images of extreme sexuality - his brief...