Any child can buy a ticket to see PG:13 rated movies like “Year One,” “Land of the Lost” or “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”
It doesn’t matter how many sexual or excretory jokes they’ll see and hear once they settle into their seats.
The folks who defend the current rating system say the descriptors accompanying these films tell parents most of what they need to know. My latest feature in The Washington Times revisits the battle over PG:13 movies.
Tell that to “Transformers” director Michael Bay.
The critically maligned auteur specifically targeted younger audiences with his latest film, a movie which features plenty of coarse gags more appropriate for R-rated fare. Some of the worst material comes from two robots who some say represent ugly racial stereotypes:
“I purely did it for kids,” the director said. “Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them.”
That doesn’t even include the “Transformers” fast food tie-ins at Burger King.
It’s disingenuous for Hollywood to claim the ratings system exists to protect children when the industry’s kingmakers specifically target young minds to fill their coffers.
(Photo: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is aimed at young viewers but features material not suitable for impressionable minds.)
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
“The price you pay for a free and open media is homework for parents,”
I agree with this and it’s the reason I check out your site and reviews. One of WWTW’s jobs is to let parents know when it’s inappropriate to bring the kids.
That being said, I concede your point. How can you tell the kids “no” when the movie has been targeted at them, advertised to them, is essentially a kids show and was spun off a kids show? In Hollywood, child abuse goes beyond 13 year olds in hot tubs, they’ve managed to package it in their films and sell it to the kids of the entire world.
I often don’ t do a thorough enough job warning parents about mature content. I suspect as Lil’ WWTW gets older that will change.
Reminds me of the days of Jack Valenti lecturing the media on why Hollywood should control the ratings system. Amazing stuff, if you think punching your wall out with your fist is amazing.
Reading this post reminds me of how close we’re actually to becoming “Idiocracy.”
I’m only 26 but I remember my mom was very strict with this sort of thing. I think my first PG-13 movie in a theater was Jurassic Park at age 10 and my first R was Ransom at age 13. I think I turned out okay.
I will concede that content can push the “rating envelope” sometimes. (It also works the other way – R-rated films that could be PG-13. Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You is rated R for one use of mother— and that’s it.)
But I had a thought this morning. Airplane! was on HBO and is rated PG, having been released before the invention of the PG-13 rating four years later. PG movies seemed to have a lot more profanity, sex, and violence back then. Some even had nudity (of course I’m thinking of Logan’s Run and the aforementioned Airplane!). The Andromeda Strain was rated G and had a brief shot of a topless woman.
Of course, movies like Airplane! weren’t targeted to kids and certainly didn’t have fast food tie-ins. Were there complaints back then?
Conversely, there were a lot of R-rated movies that would have lower ratings now. For example, you may remember this bit from Student Bodies:
Nowadays, that sequence would only have made it PG-13 (which, as you’ve pointed out, didn’t exist at the time). Notice also the reference to R-rated movies as “most popular with the moviegoing public”, which simply isn’t true these days (it arguably wasn’t true back then either, but that’s another matter).