Saturday, December 22, 2007

Hollywood

I like watching movies. It's fun to take a walk in someone else's shoes for 2 hours and then come back to my own. But every time I see a movie I can't help but notice the degradation in society.

There are so many good movies out there, but as time goes on very few new movies are clean. Sure there are movies that have an "acceptable" amount of violence, sex, or language that wouldn't keep a fairly reasonable person from seeing it. It might not be perfect, but it's not going to keep you from getting a temple recommend. But there are probably one or two movies released per year that are actually clean. No innuendos, no "brief language" and no "brief sexual content". Pixar has released some very clean movies in the past few years, but even they find ways to work in a small innuendo here and there, some sort of language that although is a far cry from a PG-13 rating, you definitely wouldn't say yourself.

There are also the PG-13 movies that could be easily rated PG or even G if you took out the unnecessary language. In fact, there are quite a few R-rated movies that get a PG rating when they edit them for TV, and if they took out a few scenes, or the TV swears, it could even be rated G.

Now that's where CleanFlicks came in. Whenever a movie trailer came out that looked really good, but had a questionable rating, I would always say "Oh well, I'll just see it cleanflicksed." But then Hollywood came in and ruined that for us too. When they found out that people were watching their movies without the nasty scenes included, they were furious. I originally thought it was a money issue, but it was not about the money. The owners of Cleanflicks offered to pay for every rental or sale, but it wasn't even about that. The makers of the movies simply want to pollute the minds of America. They don't really care anymore if you would not pay to see an R-rated movie, but would pay to see an edited one. All they want is to ruin society.

Now I'm not sure if you know or not, but Cleanflicks came back under a different name and an "educational" loophole that kept them in business, doing exactly what they always did. Providing entertainment for the people who still have morals. But what do you know, the crooks in Hollywood recently found out about that too, and are threatening to sue. They were even bold enough to admit that this isn't about who is right or wrong. They just know that a small company like Flix Club can't afford to be tied up in court for years. Even if they won their lawsuit, it would still put them out of business.

I have never understood why so many R-rated movies come out every year, when the makers of the movies know that they won't make even a quarter as much money as if they would have released a PG-13 movie, or even a PG movie. It still doesn't make sense to me that anyone is that stupid. But apparently it's not about the money. It's not about anything.

1 comments:

Elder Roxas said...

Hey,
Good thoughts! I'd have to say that I disagree on a lot of them, though - but I'm going into filmmaking for a career, so I could be biased. I would agree that it isn't about money, but it certainly is about something: love. It's kinda damning to say filmmakers are ruining society - but we have different backgrounds, I gues. I have a differing argument on my Sundance Krités blog, if you'd like to read it.