Original Desmond

Robocop and Pompeii are two movies this year which should have been a hard R rated movie and not a PG -13 movie

Pompeii was part gladiator movie with no blood or gore and part disaster movie where everyone just kept running but no one died.

Just stupid !

Robocop remake was a joke as PG -13 !

I know there are financial reasons why movies are made to be PG-13 but it's really peeing me off !

TheMovieman

I think we were watching different movies because between the flaming balls of fire from the volcano and the floods from the tsnami, thousands of people died...

Jory

It's all about context. If they make the film exactly the way they want and it just happens to be PG-13, fine. If they're dealing with material that clearly needs to be rated R and they either edit content or don't include the content to begin with in order to get a lower rating, then it's a problem.

I remember hearing all sorts of moaning about the Total Recall remake being PG-13, but when the film came out, nobody was complaining about it any more, even people who hated the movie. The filmmakers weren't going for the ultra-violence of the first movie; what they were going for didn't really need to be anything more than PG-13.

Recently I was posting in other topics about Alien vs. Predator, and how the PG-13 didn't really matter. It's a far more bloody and violent film than Alien or even Aliens, but since most of the violence was directed toward alien creatures who have green blood, the MPAA let them keep all the impaling and decapitations and blood-splattering intact. I didn't really feel that an R-rated version would have been much different, and the Unrated cut only added a second or two of violence.

(As an interesting side-note, the PG-13 Alien vs. Predator is a far better horror thriller than the R-rated Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The sequel is nothing more than a gore-fest, with the directors using the R rating to do little more than a series of gross-out scenes, while the first movie actually has some scenes of genuine tension and suspense mixed in with the violence. One team of filmmakers clearly had their priorities in order, while the others didn't. So much for "giving the fans what they want.")

Of course, you also have movies like Live Free or Die Hard in which they obviously wanted to make an R-rated film but had to edit out a lot of content to get a PG-13 that was mandated from above, and I'll be the first one to cry bullshit over that. But with movies like Total Recall and Alien vs. Predator, I think the filmmakers made pretty much exactly the films they wanted to make.

I haven't seen the RoboCop remake (I'll pick up the Blu-ray in June), but just viewing the trailers made me suspect that the PG-13 wouldn't really be an issue, since they were clearly focusing less on the theme of society's desensitization to violence and more on the themes of the struggle to maintain humanity and the manipulation of media. The studio was probably quite pleased that it was PG-13, but I doubt that they insisted on such a rating. I could be wrong, of course, and I'm sure that people who have seen the film will chime in below with more informed views.

Original Desmond

Yes they died, but not in gory detail

auto

Still waiting on the examples promised in the thread title.

Super X

Unfortunately, it probably would have been just as much a joke if it was R rated.

Michael Corvin

Jaws

inri222

Don't be surprised if the new Beverly Hills Cop is PG-13.

Shannon Nutt

Probably a guarantee...although I think Beverly Hills Cop 3 is pretty close to being a PG-13 by today's standards.

Obi-Wanma

Honestly, I always thought it was PG-13, I had to look it up after I read this. I don't remember anything in that film that would have justified an R.

Dan

/thread

Solid Snake

Yep. Pretty much this thread is done. Context is a hell of a thing.

RoboCop had an awesome shootout in the dark. Some good action too. I liked it for what it was. It was a weak narrative sadly. Could have been more honed in but whatever. Really liked Oldman in this too.

dugan

Pearl Harbor is a pretty good example.

Ash Ketchum

Once upon a time gladiator movies and disaster movies were aimed at general audiences. I remember tons of Italian gladiator movies playing in theaters when I was a kid. And they were marketed to kids! On TV we saw THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII (1935), which had gladiators and disaster, with lots of death and destruction. It would have been rated G.

Some of the Italian spectacles could be pretty bloody, though. I remember seeing LAST OF THE VIKINGS in a theater with a packed audience of kids when I was 8 or 9 and all we could talk about was the scene where the hero splits a bear's head with an ax. (Where was PETA when we needed them?) Nobody complained about violence in those films because no grown-ups were paying attention to them, not even the critics. They were all too busy complaining about violence in TV westerns and "The Untouchables." (TV started to get so boring at a certain point in the 1960s because of this.) And we weren't gonna tell our parents about the scene with the ax and the bear's head. We didn't want them to stop letting us go to the movies by ourselves.

Today's over-parented kids are seeing all these computer animated children's films and not seeing any gladiator or sci-fi movies because their parents won't let them. What happens to the poor 8- or 9-year-old boy who wants to see the EXPENDABLES movies and not HOW TO DRAIN YOUR DRAGON?

RichC2

I'm sick of movies made to be R when they should be NC-17 rated.

It's a totally legit rating, movie theaters should just accept it. I mean shit, you had to import Kill Bill Vol 1 to get the proper version of the Crazy 88 fight, or wait for a dvd release to see threesomes like in American Psycho, or some slightly graphic ass-to-ass in Requiem for a Dream.

Solid Snake

I think NC-17 can a be a good rating to go for at times. Some films in the past 10 years that have gotten it totally rocked it with a justifiable reason to go that far.

My problem with that rating use is that we will also get pure crap trying to push the envelope.

I still need to get Lust, Caution.

majorjoe23

The latter should be NC-17. You can't tell me that much shaking and lotion needs to be "part of the process."

inri222

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109254/...ef_=tt_stry_pg

Sex & Nudity : Basically none, except few mild sexual comments (nothing too bad).

Violence & Gore : Lots of shootings and killings but with very little blood. The movie is much lighter in terms of violence than the previous two.

Profanity : Despite the fact it's rated R like the other two, it has less swearing in it, and thus this BHC movie only has 8 F words and some uses of milder language.

Ash Ketchum

Well played, sir.

Decker

I never did understand the F-word thing deciding between PG-13 and R. If it's a word that automatically earns an "R" so be it. If it's a context thing, where using it as an exclamation of frustration, that's PG-13 but as a descriptive verb it's always an "R", I'd be okay with that too. But as it stands now, it's a numbers thing - I forget the exact number, but like 1-2 F-words are okay for PG-13, more is not. That's so arbitrary. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is rated R strictly for that Steve Martin Rent-a-Car scene and the F-word tally. The King's Speech was R-rated for the therapeutic swearing and then got a post-release reduction upon appeal. Bully was R-rated despite a plea from the studio that this film is targeted towards middle-school kids simply because of the number of F-words used (by kids in school!). It seems to me if some F-words used in a non-sexually explicit way is acceptable for a PG-13 movie, then the number of times it's used is really irrelevant.

inri222

As far as I know Bully has 2 cuts an R rated and Unrated. The Unrated cut that's 6 minutes longer is the equivalent of an NC-17 and there is no way that cut would make an R rating. Are you sure you don't mean Kids?

hanshotfirst1138

You're thinking of the Larry Clark film, there's another film with the same title that's a documentary a it bullying. Can't let kids hear profanity. After, high school kids don't swear! God no!

RichC2

I've seen both movies so this made me

Why So Blu?

Barbarella was rated PG when that came out and it should have been rated R. I have the Blu-ray and there were a couple of shots of nudity along with Jane Fonda getting an orgasm machine installed into her and she breaks the fucking thing cuz Barbarella is a beast! It's context but that was also the late 60's before rated R even existed.

Ash Ketchum

BARBARELLA was labeled "Suggested for Mature Audiences" when it was released, which was a month before the ratings system was instituted. My guess is that after November 1, 1968, when the ratings began and BARBARELLA was still in release, they simply added the "M" rating to BARBARELLA. That's what I remember. (I can check my records when I get home.)

PG came later, in 1972, after M had converted to GP in 1970.