(Civilized) Ranting About Rating

I had an interesting movie experience last night - I saw how a PG-13 film is made.

Back in 2006 (sheesh, that long ago?) a sweet, quirky movie came out called "Penelope". It is about a girl who is the victim of a family curse and comes equipped with smarts, charm, great hair (extensions), and the nose of a pig. It also features a scruffy, greasy-haired, emo-enabled James McAvoy (still swoon-worthy, though - and ironically playing an American while most of the movie was shot in London. Great accent). In the States, at least, the movie was rated PG, which meant I was guilt-free when taking my niece to a showing while on a girls' day out.

Yesterday, I pulled up what is evidently a British version of the movie - it's longer by at least a few minutes, since there were scenes I'd never seen before. One of those scenes involved a rude gesture, one with the aftermath of a family member's infidelity. Others were sprinkled with a few more (relatively mild, but still) swear words. There was nothing there that was massively offensive (especially if you watch prime-time TV) and some of the additions were interesting expansions on the characters, which I liked. The thing that really stood out to me was that I could absolutely see how the cuts from yesterday's version to get it to the in-the-American-theaters (and on DVD) version made it so distinctly a PG movie instead of PG-13. (Now, versus almost 5 years ago, the longer version would probably actually rate a PG, but it's very clear how things were thematically cut.)

So, swear words, rude gestures, thematic issues that had no bearing whatsoever on the story being told were all the things that were cut out to make a good, clean movie. The movie didn't suffer from not being "real" - it's a movie. It wasn't ever real anyway. In the end the editing focused on the plot and not on interesting distractions. This certainly can't be the only movie that would benefit from that kind of focus - and I mean 'benefit' in a literal sense.

There was an article in the Deseret News recently that talked about the dearth of PG and G-rated movies. The author writes that in the years from 1995 to 2011, there were "...more than 4,300 PG-13 and R-rated movies making an average of $29 million compared with almost 1,200 PG and G flicks that make an average of $38.4 million per show." Granted, there were far fewer of them made, but they're averaging almost 10 million more per movie than those with darker ratings! I might be crazy, but I would think that clean, family-friendly shows that cost less to make (since you don't tend to be blowing things up and such) and have a higher average return would be a good investment. At a guess, I figure you'd need at least another thousand PG or G movies before you started skewing the average... and it's going to take another several years in which we'll see many, many more PG-13 and R before we hit that thousand. Just think - spend the money you would have used to make one crappy, formulaic blood-and-guts action movie to make two or three smarter, funnier (or sadder) movies that parents and kids can see and talk about together, and you're practically guaranteed an extra 20-30 million before you've even started.

Surely I'm not the only person to have figured this out - come on, Hollywood, we don't need sex and violence and bad language. (We've got the news for that.) We need good storytelling and new ways to see ourselves and the ones we love, interesting ways to talk about people and ideas. Yes, you can do all this with the 'reality' of sensuality and obscenity and violent behavior - but Ima gonna call you out, Hollywood, and tell you to lay off the trash. I'm better than that, smarter than that, and so is most of the rest of your audience. We don't NEED any of that junk.

So stop trying to sell it to us!

Thank you.