This Film is Not Yet Rated- Jackie Claypool
This week we watched a movie called This Film is Not Yet Rated. The whole idea of this film was to talk about the design of rating films. Throughout the film you learn that movies get rated by a panel of member whose names and identities are kept secret in order to keep them from “influence.� A lot of people within the film industry wonder if this rating system is bias and unfair, because of the fact that some films that seem like they should be rated R are in fact rated NC-17 and vice versa. The bad thing about having your film rated NC-17 is that it can’t be played in theaters, which causes not a lot of people to see it resulting in very low profit.
According to Daniel Franklin’s Politics and Film reading “the rating system is based on the number of and graphic nature of the acts of violence and explicit sex as depicted in a film.� One of the interesting things that I learned in the movie is that when it comes to sex and violence the rating system is more likely to rate a violent movie R, while other films that depict graphic sexual actions are more likely to be rated NC-17. This tells us a lot about our society in the fact that we would rather have our children see a film where a man kills another man, than seeing a man and a woman having sex. The weird thing about this is that there have been numerous studies on whether movies and television effect children’s actions, and they have found that they have. So wouldn’t it be wise to rethink that “more accepting� view of violence that is held throughout society?