Not long ago, SC had occasion to write about the free speech issues involved in distributing censored versions of movies. Today, he learned about another alternative, which he's also not likely to make use of, but which certainly sidesteps the free speech issues.
A husband-and-wife team have started a website called "ScreenIt", dedicated to reviewing movies, not on aesthetic grounds, but simply to catalogue their content in a variety of potentially offensive categories. Their self-description:
Screen It! was created to give parents a way to access the content of popular entertainment their kids are exposed to. It is not intended as censorship. Rather, it is designed to allow Hollywood and Record Labels to continue to produce movies, videos and music while informing parents of the content in them. Some people argue over the moral quality of films while others want to ban certain albums that contain material that particularly offends them.That is censorship, and it's not right for others to decide what you or your children can see. That decision lies with you. Until now, however, there was no way for parents to find out about the content of movies, videos, or music. For movies, the MPAA rating (G, PG, etc...) is a start, but offers just a one line, generalized description of the "offending" material. A few newsletters here and there offer a little more information, but are usually biased or are lacking in detailed content listings.
They list 15 types of potential offense for each film, and have a couple of possible values for each of them. No key is provided, but each one seems to range from "mild" through "moderate" to "extreme". A sampling of their reviews indicates that for each movie they cover, they've got a fairly exhaustive catalogue of the various scenes that lead them to assign each value.
Although SC is pretty much happy with the existing MPAA ratings, it's certainly conceivable that some people might not mind their kids being exposed to nonstop gore, but have a problem with foul language, or "inappropriate music" (I'm not kidding; it's one of their categories). Considered as metadata about the movies under review, this is an interesting approach -- one could easily conceive of categories being standardized, and then publishing more detailed ratings indicating the types of items which give offense.
While we're thinking about it, there are plenty of opportunities for having finely tuned metadata available to describe movie content (or books, or music, etc.). How many of us would have been grateful for reviews of this film that clearly indicated the presence of flashy CGI sequences, but also the complete and total absence of a credible plot or efforts by the actors? Of course, much of this can be obtained by reading current reviews, but those can be full of hedges and qualifications. Considered purely as an information-theoretic code, there might not be a less informative tool around than Siskel/Ebert/Roeper's thumbs-up/down. It can only convey two states! Extending that to even be separate thumbs-up/down for each of a half-dozen criteria would tell us a lot more about the qualities of a movie than simply whether it's good or bad. Some people just want to see extended CGI-fests; others, beautiful costumes (or people). And some of us even are concerned with whether or not there's a point. All it would take is one, maybe two lines of text in your local paper, where whole paragraphs go in now.
Of course, one perfectly reasonable objection is that any coding scheme short of natural language is going to be largely an exercise in oversimplification, not to mention the fact that this approach completely deprecates the writings skills of reviewers. To which SC says, "So what?". How many of these people were worth reading beforehand? It's been a while since your host can recall reading a review of anything broadly falling under the "pop culture" label that he considered to have literary/artistic merit in itself. That's not to say that such writing hasn't existed in the past -- it may still be produced today -- but the review as a literary form in itself strikes SC as having taken a miserable beating. A few ones and zeros could hardly be that much worse.
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