There will be controversy over R ratings
Chris Hicks
The R-rated movie in question is the eccentric melodrama that won Daniel Day-Lewis his second Oscar last weekend for his brilliant performance as a reprehensible oilman over a 29-year period.
Whatever your feelings about the movie, whether or not you were able to get into the story about the life and times of the miserly lead character, let's look at it the way the ratings board allegedly looks at all films.
One of the things the Motion Picture Association of America insists is true is that movies are rated objectively by virtue of content, regardless of subject matter.
Story, dialogue, character development, good guys, bad guys, upbeat, downbeat, political or ideological agenda ... none of this matters. Violence, sex, nudity, language, drug use — the level of those things, how much, how graphic — are what members of the Classification and Ratings Administration evaluate as they watch the movies they rate.
Whether any of them loves, hates or is indifferent to the film is irrelevant.
Allegedly.
Not that the job can really be objective. Whatever they say, it's still a subjective business — especially in one area that has become a fairly recent addition to the above list: "thematic elements."
PG-17 might be more reasonable. But then, that would cut into R-rated territory, since R-rated films are, in theory, restricted to patrons 17 and older.
On the other hand, I can't say that I've run into very many movies lately that received R ratings they didn't deserve.
Which brings us back to "There Will Be Blood." Unlike the old days, when we often wondered why a movie had a rating, films now carry an explanation from the board specifying the content that earned each film its R or PG-13 or PG or G.
"There Will Be Blood" is officially rated R for "some violence." That's it.
If you watch the film, you'll see that it has a couple of scenes of accidental violence in the first half, and in the film's second half there are two murders. And none of these moments is nearly as violent as the average TV episode of any of the "CSIs" or "Law & Orders."
So, should "There Will Be Blood" really be in the same R-rated category as the "Saw" and "Hostel" flicks? Or even its best-picture Oscar competitors, "No Country for Old Men" or "Atonement" or "Michael Clayton," all of which have content that is much more clearly in R-rated territory?
If we were to discuss this philosophically, one could argue that "There Will Be Blood" is an adult film, with adult themes. It's dark and harsh and generally not a picture that impressionable youngsters should see anyway. So why not give it an R?
But the ratings board can't start thinking like that.
If it does, the board's members might have to rethink all those PG-13 movies that are adult films with adult themes and are generally not pictures that impressionable youngsters should see anyway.
And we can't have that.
E-mail: hicks@desnews.com
Recent comments
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