There you have it. There’s the word – six times, just as the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) found in the film Bully, causing them to slap the movie with an R rating.
Point of disclosure: I have not seen the film yet, but I’ve heard and read about it enough to know that, once again, the MPAA has shown what a group of sex-phobic, swear-aversive, yet violence-loving morons they are. They’ll grant a film filled with blood, guts, gore, murder and mayhem a PG rating, but slap an R (or worse) on a film because someone curses or gets naked. Art be damned, long live Puritanism!
Salon.com has published a couple good pieces on the issue. Andrew O’Hehir has this to say:
With its unerring instinct for being on the wrong side of every major social and aesthetic issue, the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board has refused to budge off its R rating for Bully an earnest and moving documentary made for and about tormented preteens and teenagers. There’s almost a perverse, Santorum-style integrity about the MPAA’s staunch resistance. Its ratings board — an anonymous group of Los Angeles-area parents — stands tall for some unspecified and imaginary set of American values, in the face of a viral lobbying campaign that has enlisted Justin Bieber, Johnny Depp, Martha Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and nearly 500,000 other people, and made an overnight media celebrity out of 17-year-old Katy Butler, a self-described victim of bullying who started the online petition.
But what’s really perverse, of course — not to mention cruel and repellent — is a ratings decision that ensures that the kids who most need the succor that Bully has to offer are now the least likely to see it.
Please read more about this issue and then click here to sign the petition urging the MPAA to come to its senses.
Next step: write your Congress rep to have the MPAA put out of its (our) misery.
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