Marshall and the Movies

I’ve been meaning to enshrine this article in factoid ink for about 7 months now, and the opportunity has finally risen for me to do that!  Huzzah!

Now that I’m 18 and can legally see any movie I want, I get a little PO’d when movies that look promising to me get a PG-13 rating.  Call it selfishness, which it probably is, but I want the movies to be targeted to me, not the little 12-year-olds who get dropped off at the theater.  Now that I’m on the other side of the age divide, I simply don’t want movies to be dumbed-down to be appropriate enough for everyone to buy a ticket.  I understand that it’s all for commercial reasons, but this often leads to a decline in quality.

I’m not talking about the obvious editing that cut the F-bomb out of “The Social Network” to get it a PG-13; I’m talking about the lower-caliber action movies that drop down a few notches so parents feel OK dropping off their 10-year-olds to see it.  It’s unsatisfying for those of us who like watching GOOD action that you can only get in an R-rated movie, and once you’ve seen it done at its most violent, it’s hard to respect the kiddie version.

Which brings me to a piece Entertainment Weekly posted in June 2010 about “The A-Team,” asking if the PG-13 rating ruined yet another action movie, much like “The Green Hornet” did this week.  They not only dialed down the action for the Seth Rogen vehicle, but they also had to dim the drunk/stoner humor which could have added a lot more to the movie.  Author Darren Franich described “The A-Team” experience as something that “could have been an enjoyably coarse testosterone-fest [but] felt pruned and bland.”  The same words can easily describe this week’s opener, which has put up unspectacular numbers at the box office.

So, for the viewing pleasure of everyone who earns money to pay for movies, let’s make all action movies R-rated!  Kids just sneak into them anyways; it’s not like the rating is any sort of an unmovable barrier.

(I will add as a caveat to this piece that the standards for what’s permissible in a PG-13 seems to have really dropped in recent years, probably to the point that something rated R a few years ago could probably get a PG-13 now.)