After nearly three decades, the PG-13 rating seems to have outlived its usefulness.
Make no mistake, the PG-13 rated movies are getting edgier and rougher -- including, notably, the final “Harry Potter” installments, and the even more brutal “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” that debuted last weekend.
Especially at “Apes,” unsuspecting child-accompanied parents may have found themselves wondering just how much more ape-thwacking, electrocuting, cop-pummeling onscreen action it would take to push the simian origin story a notch deeper into marketing no-no land.
Meanwhile, a genial Oscar-bait historical film that features a four-letter word in just one scene got clobbered with the dreaded R rating -- as do any number of films with milder sex than you’d see on HBO in primetime.
Indeed, the Motion Picture Assn. of America's rating system garnered a lot of attention late last year, when it not only slapped "The King's Speech" with an R but also delivered the entirely restrictive NC-17 mark to another Weinstein Co. film, Ryan Gosling drama "Blue Valentine" (above), largely on the pungency of a single sex scene.
Also read: Harvey Wins! MPAA Overturns 'Blue Valentine's NC-17
Weinstein successfully appealed the rating for "Blue Valentine" (below), bringing it down to the much more accessible R. After the R-rated "King's Speech" won Best Picture at the Oscars, the studio released an f-word-less version to try and reach an even bigger audience.
Studio co-chair Harvey Weinstein noted the tendency of the MPAA to hammer movies for including sex and coarse language, but not violence.
"While we respect the MPAA, I think we can all agree that we are living with an outdated ratings system that gives torture porn, horror and ultraviolent films the same rating as films with so-called inappropriate language," Weinstein said in a November statement.
Also read: MPAA Appeals Board: 'Dream House' Deserves R Rating
To his point, within the broad framework of PG-13, pre-teen moviegoers this summer got to see not just "Apes" and the darkest "Potter" of all, but Vin Diesel and the Rock brutally pummel each other in Universal's "Fast Five." They also got to see a subterranean alien eat and dismember human prey in the Steven Spielberg-produced, J.J. Abrams-directed "Super 8."
And upcoming: the adaptation of the popular "Hunger Games" novel, in which youths must battle each other to the death, the winner providing enough food for his or her village to survive for a year.
So, at what point of roughness -- necessary or unnecessary -- does the MPAA move a film from PG-13 to R?
First, a bit of history.
It’s seldom remembered now how the MPAA instituted, in 1984, the PG-13 rating to bridge the gap in the deep divide between PG and R.
