I have long been upset with the MPAA and their movie rating system (you know, G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.) They are a private company set up to support the movie industry and they answer to no one. They are unmonitored and very secretive. I have never understood why movies are given a useless blanket rating and not rated in areas so that parents (or direct viewers) could make their own decisions of what they were concerned about seeing (some people don’t care if they see violence or suspense but don’t want to see nudity or someone might not be as concerned about language as someone else but might be concerned about drug use, etc.) I have often felt that there are many PG movies that are very inappropriate for the majority of children and plenty of R movies with hardly anything wrong at all.
Take Evil Dead for example. If I was a rater or a parent deciding if my kids could watch that movie I would have given it a PG rating. Sure there is “blood” but it is SO fake and almost never human blood just “blood” like the house walls bleeding. No amount of “wood and plaster blood”, in my opinion, should ever take a movie over PG. What is wrong with red liquid running out of wood? They didn’t even imply that it was human blood. Nothing of the sort. Just a haunted house with walls that bled. Oh no, don’t let your kids see that! I guess a hospital documentary would be NC-17 then. Even if it was just shots of people using ketchup in the cafeteria.
Wil Wheaton has a review today of This Film is Not Yet Rated. It is a good, short article and I think that anyone who ever uses the MPAA rating (I do not) should read it before relying on such a system. If you really want to take a stand against the MPAA you can simply do what I do and never go to movie theatres. The MPAA rating is mostly only used there and you can voice your opinion pretty strongly with your pocketbook.