Problems with movie ratings

I am bothered by the current state of affairs of the content ratings for movies handed out by the Motion Picture Association of America. You know, the PG, PG-13, R thingys. The PG-13 rating may have sounded like a good idea, but I think it's turned into a terrible thing. These days, it seems all studios point their aim very strongly toward achieving a PG-13 rating; they say it generally leads to the widest audience for a film.

But the problem is that parents often automatically assume a movie rated PG-13 is appropriate for teens; however, films with a PG-13 rating can encompass such a wide range of content. The rating is really quite useless and contradictory regarding what content is permitted. For example, one utterance of "one of the harsher sexually-derived words" (generally meaning the "f" word) is permitted. If you allow it once, what's the difference to allowing it multiple times?? Do they think if you say it only once, it might not be noticed??

Violence is permitted in a PG-13 unless it becomes "too rough or persistent." The problem is the definition of violence--it seems to require harmful human to human action to qualify. I have seen so many PG-13 movies that have had such an intensity and "fear factor" that it concerns me that teens are regularly being exposed to these films. A good case in point is this summer's War of the Worlds: sure, humans weren't generally being violent to others, but geez, aliens were vaporizing humans! I was emotionally exhausted after that movie; what's it doing to our teenagers? There are many other examples of films with this sort of intensity that still managed a PG-13 rating.

I miss R-rated movies. A common theme heard on DVD commentaries is how the director ended up very frustrated at how the movie had to be chopped down to achieve a PG-13 rating rather than just sticking with the R it really deserved based on the script.

I wish studios would just stop using the rating system. Instead, upon release of a film, publish a content guide for parents that describes the questionable elements. Let's not try to fit everything into neat ratings categories--just tell us what's in the movie and let us decide what's appropriate for us and our children to watch.

I'd like to think that as movie viewing continues to shift from the theater to home, the standard ratings system will become less important and eventually go away.

UPDATE 9/13/2005: I found a very interesting article describing a study analyzing the MPAA ratings in correlation with those from a couple of online ratings systems (Kids-in-mind and ScreenIt.com). It found "ratings creep" in the MPAA ratings, meaning each year, more and more violence, sex, and adult language is permitted in a particular rating so that a PG-13 movie released today probably contains more potentially inappropriate content than one released ten years ago. This was particularly true with the violence category. The other significant finding is that there is a huge variability in content within each MPAA rating. Some PG-13 movies are tame while others have more violence than many R-rated movies. It was also seen that a lot of violence is allowed in G-rated movies as long as it's animated. If you're interested in this subject, check out the article on the study.