Well, if Chris Dodd can do for the dry-heaving movie industry what he did for the ass-pounding predation of Wall Street finance, we should be balls deep in a huge vat of pig shit, torture porn, and reboots of comic book franchises in no time. You know, pretty much like we have been at the local cinemascope. CinemaCon indeed, these assholes work the long con, always.
This is how the movie industry functions: for years they have been acting as if frowning at the portrayal of smoking a cigarette in a scene is a sign of moral fortitude. They might now do the same with the portrayal of guns, and the use thereof. [Ed.: Good luck with that; are action heroes supposed to point a fucking banana at the villain and yell, "Bang!"?] This is known in the industry parlance as Being Seen Doing Something. Feel safer now?
The MPAA's supposed values have always been warped; a dozen people can get blown away in a barrage of gunfire in a PG-13 movie. You can have just shy of a metric fuckton of violence and maintain that rating, but Flying Spaghetti Monster help your sorry ass if the eff-word is dropped more than twice, or (gasp!shriek!) a nipple is viewed.
A female nipple, that is. Male nipples are fine, but apparently the sight of funbags, and the nozzle thereof, will send your tiny little brain into shock, and start an early rutting season. Why, even the shadow of areolae (probably the worst of the mid-'70s prog-rock albums) will get you the R, while as in the above linked example, you can pound a person's face into a table so that an implanted pencil rams through his eye, and keep that PG-13 rating.
Or again, consider the wave of grotesque torture porn schlock that proliferated through much of the last decade, assorted schlubs molested and butchered in the most gratuitous methods possible by unrepentant psychopaths, sometimes portrayed to be almost sympathetic characters. Same rating as the movie that showed a titty, or had a couple f-bombs. As bad aesthetically as it might be for a movie to have a scene where a kid fucks an apple pie, it seems somehow more benign than someone blowtorching a girl's eye out of her head. Yet those two movies have identical ratings. I am going to go out on an enormous limb and assert that if you want to lessen violence and improve people's happiness in entertainment product, make fewer movies about bright thing go boom, and more movies about Salma Hayek's prodigious cans (possibly NSFW).
Whatever's clever. What's a slam-dunk guarantee is that the MPAA, which is a lobbying organization cut from much of the same cloth as the NRA, will sooner rather than later skulk into Warshington seeking some sort of emolument or favor. This will be in return for its supposed concessions in this ricockulously arch aesthetic conceit, that if fewer guns are shown on-screen, if the violence is portrayed secondarily, that there will be some sort of societal benefit, fewer school massacres or what have you.
This is the same sort of moronic line of thought that, back in the '80s, presumed that heavy metal was "making" teenagers kill themselves, as if their shitty lives and meaningless futures had nothing to do with anything. The kids today, with their Call of Duty and their Grand Theft Auto, desensitizing their tiny little brains until they have no other option but to take Mommy's Glock to the local primary school and tune it up on a classroom of first-graders. Right?
We're all just easily impressionable automatons, hopelessly compelled to imitate our entertainment experiences, doomed to end up as YouTube fodder on Tosh.0 or Jackass, until some do-gooder asshole senator decides to Save The Children with a decree of holy writ that any entertainment product should be bowdlerized enough so that a seven-year-old can watch without getting traumatized. That seems to be the line of thought implicit in the actions and words of organizations such as the MPAA, which is infinitely more concerned about digital piracy of their lousy comic-book movies and public-domain retreads, than about anything else, such as whether their ratings system makes any sense in the first place.
This is your gubmint in a nutshell, friends 'n' neighbors -- mired in inertia and clutter, besotted by lobbyist pelf, they act as if they seriously think that taking some sort of pretend moral stand on gun violence might prevent actual gun violence. This is sort of like presuming that if they sought or even created newer and better source material, they would stop making the same shitty movies over and over again.
This is how the movie industry functions: for years they have been acting as if frowning at the portrayal of smoking a cigarette in a scene is a sign of moral fortitude. They might now do the same with the portrayal of guns, and the use thereof. [Ed.: Good luck with that; are action heroes supposed to point a fucking banana at the villain and yell, "Bang!"?] This is known in the industry parlance as Being Seen Doing Something. Feel safer now?
The MPAA's supposed values have always been warped; a dozen people can get blown away in a barrage of gunfire in a PG-13 movie. You can have just shy of a metric fuckton of violence and maintain that rating, but Flying Spaghetti Monster help your sorry ass if the eff-word is dropped more than twice, or (gasp!shriek!) a nipple is viewed.
A female nipple, that is. Male nipples are fine, but apparently the sight of funbags, and the nozzle thereof, will send your tiny little brain into shock, and start an early rutting season. Why, even the shadow of areolae (probably the worst of the mid-'70s prog-rock albums) will get you the R, while as in the above linked example, you can pound a person's face into a table so that an implanted pencil rams through his eye, and keep that PG-13 rating.
Or again, consider the wave of grotesque torture porn schlock that proliferated through much of the last decade, assorted schlubs molested and butchered in the most gratuitous methods possible by unrepentant psychopaths, sometimes portrayed to be almost sympathetic characters. Same rating as the movie that showed a titty, or had a couple f-bombs. As bad aesthetically as it might be for a movie to have a scene where a kid fucks an apple pie, it seems somehow more benign than someone blowtorching a girl's eye out of her head. Yet those two movies have identical ratings. I am going to go out on an enormous limb and assert that if you want to lessen violence and improve people's happiness in entertainment product, make fewer movies about bright thing go boom, and more movies about Salma Hayek's prodigious cans (possibly NSFW).
Whatever's clever. What's a slam-dunk guarantee is that the MPAA, which is a lobbying organization cut from much of the same cloth as the NRA, will sooner rather than later skulk into Warshington seeking some sort of emolument or favor. This will be in return for its supposed concessions in this ricockulously arch aesthetic conceit, that if fewer guns are shown on-screen, if the violence is portrayed secondarily, that there will be some sort of societal benefit, fewer school massacres or what have you.
This is the same sort of moronic line of thought that, back in the '80s, presumed that heavy metal was "making" teenagers kill themselves, as if their shitty lives and meaningless futures had nothing to do with anything. The kids today, with their Call of Duty and their Grand Theft Auto, desensitizing their tiny little brains until they have no other option but to take Mommy's Glock to the local primary school and tune it up on a classroom of first-graders. Right?
We're all just easily impressionable automatons, hopelessly compelled to imitate our entertainment experiences, doomed to end up as YouTube fodder on Tosh.0 or Jackass, until some do-gooder asshole senator decides to Save The Children with a decree of holy writ that any entertainment product should be bowdlerized enough so that a seven-year-old can watch without getting traumatized. That seems to be the line of thought implicit in the actions and words of organizations such as the MPAA, which is infinitely more concerned about digital piracy of their lousy comic-book movies and public-domain retreads, than about anything else, such as whether their ratings system makes any sense in the first place.
This is your gubmint in a nutshell, friends 'n' neighbors -- mired in inertia and clutter, besotted by lobbyist pelf, they act as if they seriously think that taking some sort of pretend moral stand on gun violence might prevent actual gun violence. This is sort of like presuming that if they sought or even created newer and better source material, they would stop making the same shitty movies over and over again.
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