The Ineffectiveness of the Film Ratings System :: Movie Film Essays

John Small, a fourteen year old boy in Uptown St. Paul, proceeds into the Suburban World Cinema, anxious to see Abel Ferraras poor Lieutenant. He is equipped with a parental none, replete with the phone calculate where his parents can be reached to verify that they did indeed author the note should its authenticity be questioned. John pushes s regular crumpled-up dollar bills and the folded note into the metal trap under the box office window, only to be met with a tinny, disinterested voice booming through the round silver speaker attach on the window No children under seventeen allowed Sorry. This note isnt gonna repulse it. The incident exemplifies a pressing unloose in the ever-topical discussion of the oft-vilified fritter away rating classification dust in our country. Is the movie rating system, before designed to support parents in guiding the movie-going habits of their children, actually preempting parental plectron? To at least some people, however, Jack Valen ti, the man responsible for fashioning the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of home Owners, is leading the effort, as editorialist James Wall put it, to nourish children (1227). Valenti wrote, The voluntary Movie Rating System has one objective to issue advance cautionary warnings to parents so they can make their own decisions nearly what movies their children should or should not see. No one -- appointed, anointed, or elected -- ought to participate themselves into individual parental decisions (87). But the film classification system, designed to assist parents in making decisions about their offsprings film patronage, often thwarts that very use and, in the process, actually stifles the creativity and honesty of the film industry as well. Although Valenti and the Rating Systems advocates claim that parents should have the final choice in what their children view, the system may, in practice, obstruct that purpose for parents who decide tha t their children should see some films. For films with the arguable NC-17 rating, the theatre is prevented from letting young John Small and his under-aged ilk from comprehend a film despite his parents permission. In fact, had John actually been attach to by his parents, the theatre would have had every right -- some would even say responsibility -- to refuse his admission. The printing of the NC-17 rating often does not read -- as would be reasonable -- Intended for Adults Only hardly rather the more rigid Not to be Attended by Children Under Seventeen.