Category: News

We had no ratings systems back in the days of my youth. The Catholic Church circulated listings to the faithful, but as a young Jewess in America I could go to anything I wanted, as long as my parents approved enough to drive me there and buy my ticket.

In many ways, there was no reason to have movie ratings. The studios agreed to the Hayes code, which uphold certain standards about language, nudity and gruesome violence.  Arbitrary, ridiculous standards, but generally understood by the audience.

By the late 1960s, all this fell by the wayside as film, like other popular media, responded to an opening up of the culture and a liberation from repressive societal standards (and instituted some new ones, but that’s another sixty or seventy columns). Filmmakers wanted to show how people really talked and really looked and really acted.

Hence, a rating system. It wasn’t great. I remember, after seeing it was rated “M” (Parental Discretion Advised), my parents decided that we, as a family, would go see Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols from Jules Feiffer’s play. I was 18, certainly old enough. And we might have had a fine time… except we took my grandparents, too.

(Side note: Has anyone ever looked more like a flesh-and-blood Feiffer cartoon that Art Garfunkel?)

In any case, movie ratings are a fact of life, along with ratings on all sorts of other things, including television, music, comics and video games. I find them relatively useless. As a parent, my standards for what was inappropriate for my child had little to do with what the ratings board thought and everything to do with my understanding of my individual kid.

The ratings continue to be useless, in no small part because in an attempt to be critically neutral (that is, to not to a position on the artistic merits of any particular film) they provide no context. A recent study showed that PG-13 movies have as much gun violence, for example, as R-rated movies, but this doesn’t necessarily tell us how violent the movie is, nor how much that violence is glamorized.

That is information thoughtful parents want to know.

Now that I’m no longer the parent to a young child, my interest in movie ratings is more selfish. An R-rated comedy is a usually a different animal entirely than a PG comedy. If there is nudity, I want to know exactly who is naked, and how inadequate I’m going to feel in comparison. If the R rating is only from cuss words, that means something entirely different from an R for violence.

So I was delighted to see that, in Sweden, there is demand for information about whether or not a movie passes the Bechdel test. As a consumer, I appreciate knowing if characters of my gender will be treated as independent human beings.

And I wondered, what other information would I appreciate getting from ratings? Here is where I would start.

• Affordable Housing. Under this new ratings system, the audience would be informed ahead of time about the credibility of the housing situation. I was watching It’s Complicated, a movie where Meryl Street has a fabulous house with a fabulous kitchen (I’m coveting kitchens these days) and a fabulous little store and fabulous men who want to have sex with her even though she is the same age they are. And I realized that this movie is, essentially, porn. It’s porn for women, but it sets up the same impossible expectations about reality as conventional porn does for men. Only in this case, the money shot isn’t ejaculation but white carpet that stays clean.

• Traffic. Children need to be protected from unreasonable glorification of dangerous driving. Even worse, it strains credulity to believe, for example, that Jack Bauer could drive across Los Angeles in the daytime in 20 minutes.

• Product Placement. Will I walk out of this movie and then be forced by my over-stimulated toddler to go to McDonalds or Toys’R’Us to buy some piece of crap that was used by the hero in the film? And can there be a parallel rating system that tells me what pro-social, non-consumer behavior is shown?

• Calories. It used to bug me a lot that the characters on soap operas, always extremely thin, spent all of their time meeting in restaurants for meals, or sundaes, or creamy coffee beverages. If I’m going to watch people eat delicious, fattening foods, I want to either see them exercising, or complaining about gaining weight.

• DQ. No, not Dairy Queen (see above), but Drag Quotient. Several years ago, when the Barb Wire movie came out, I saw a little kid run to her mother and point at the poster. “Look, it’s RuPaul!” squealed the child, with joy. No, it was Pamela Anderson, but that’s besides the point. If the movie, television show or comic book features women who have had so much work done with the implants and the hair extensions and the facial injections that they can inspire such a response, please let me know in advance.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

Closing windows on my computer so you can open them up on yours. Here we go:

• He’s the best he is at what he does, and what he does is oh so pretty: Proof that Wolverine is the greatest Disney princess of them all
• Aiming for the Scorpion Nebula, the Doctor instead lands on the beach at Brighton, and they are soon caught up in a mystery. The Time Lord and his companion discover the last Daleks. Clara’s love for her mother saves the day. Richard Branson plays a character who is killed during the opening sequence. 6 lines of JavaScript that write Doctor Who plots indistinguishable from the current series…
• ‘Walking Dead’ Spinoff Ideas From the Cast, Creators
• The Worst Reviewed Highest Grossing Movies Of All-Time
• Calvin and Hobbes’ dancing. The kids they dance, they shake their bones…
• Rescuing Sci-Fi Tales From the Ravages of Time – WSJ.com
• Neil Gaiman to Join Bard College Faculty as Professor in the Arts. It’s only Bard because Hogwarts has a hiring freeze on.
• Macmillan Publishers Expands Film Division
• This is the amazing Lockheed Martin SR-72—the space Blackbird. In other words, what the X-Men will be flying next year.
• Marvel Comics Introducing a Muslim Girl Superhero – NYTimes.com and Marvel Announce Ms Marvel Series from G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona — The Beat. The countdown to the paranoid backlash about Muslims changing shape to blend in and infiltrate America starts in 3… 2… 1…
• Coming soon from Ronald D. Moore and Javier Grillo-Marxauch on SyFy: Helix Season 1.

Anything else? Consider this an open thread.

The buddy picture was a staple of the 1970s and 1980s, possibly dating back to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but it’s been largely missing from more recent Hollywood fare. As a result, you have to given Universal Studios credit for recognizing the somewhat fresh approach in the Boom! Studios graphic novel 2Guns. Steve Grant paired two men in a drug story that felt familiar but with every action, things were never what they appeared, freshening the entire concept. Add in the charismatic Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, stir, and you have a crime story worth taking a look.

Out now on Blu-ray from Universal Home Entertainment, the film starts off with a robbery and never really slows down. Washington is Robert Trench, Bobby T, and Wahlberg is Michael Stigman, Stig, paired up to rob Mexican criminal drug lord  Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos) of $3 million in cash. Neither is ware that both men are phonies with Bobby working undercover for the DEA while Stig is a member of Naval Intelligence, hoping to obtain the money to fund their cover operations.

Instead, they wind up robbing a bank in Tres Cruces, New Mexico and walking away with over $40 million in kickbacks paid by the drug lords to the CIA. The agency dispatches Earl (Bill Paxton) to recover the money and he cuts a bloody swath as he nears the truth and the cash. Along the way, the friends discover the truth about one another but then the revelations keep on coming as Bobby realizes he’s been set up by his sometime lover Deb (Paula Patton) and Stig discovers the Navy would rather sweep the scandal under the rug than do the honorable thing.

And chasing them all is Papi, who wants revenge for being robbed and humiliated by the pair. Olmos looks like he’s having the most fun although the two lead performers also banter nicely. The problem with the film is that Blake Masters’ screenplay never properly develops a single character so they feel sketchy. We don’t know what drives Bobby to spend three years undercover and what he’s had to give up or why Stig thinks it’s okay to use drug money for government purposes.

Under Baltasar Kormakur’s direction, we get lots of nice scenes set in New Orleans, and New Mexico and some inventive action sequences but everything feels like it’s on the surface. It’s a cleverly constructed plot and no one seems interested in exploring the larger themes or motivations. Maybe this is why it was aimed at late summer, when most audiences stop thinking and accept whatever’s on the screen.

Watching at home, you stop and realize how little of the story holds up under scrutiny, especially the whole Deb betrays Bobby sub-plot. The disc includes several extended and deleted scenes, none of which add anything to a deeper understanding of the story. Koramakur and producer Adam Siegel provide a standard commentary that shows no one seemed interested in making this a more complex tale. The movie comes with “Undercover and into Action”,  a fairly by the number Making Of featurette.

How often does one get to go to both the West and East Coast premieres of a movie – if you’re not involved in it, that is? Probably not that often. But I just did, and that was pretty darned cool. This past week, I got to experience the world premiere of I Know That Voice at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood; and then two days later, the East Coast premiere of the voice acting documentary at The National Press Club right here in D.C.

If you read my columns at all, you’ll know I’m a big fan of the talents of the voiceover industry and of this documentary. So it was a ton of fun to go to the world premiere, because literally 80% of the extensive cast was in attendance, and everyone was really happy to be there.

It was fun to watch the red carpet go by before the show, particularly since everyone was having such a great time and a lot of folks were goofing off for the photographers (and I did take some pictures, but was mostly enjoying the atmosphere). And it was a total trip to sit there and watch the documentary with all of the folks in the film – who cheered the first time each of their peers appeared on the screen, and I cheered right along with ‘em. The theater was full of the happy, positive energy of a group of people who were really excited to be featured in this one-of-a-kind film; and once the film got rolling, the room was also full of laughter, since there are a lot of great funny bits in the documentary. It was a good time all around.

After the screening, director and producer Lawrence Shapiro and producers John DiMaggio and Tommy Reid were joined at the front by Andrea Romano, Rob Paulsen, Maurice LaMarche, and Tom Kenny for a question and answer session; and that was a different kind of experience too, given that the voice actors were asking each other questions at this particular Q&A, with <a href=”

predictably great results. At one relevant point in the conversation, John DiMaggio also pointed out June Foray, who was in attendance sitting just a couple of rows in front of me, and the entire theater gave the accomplished thespian, still working at the age of ninety-five, a well-deserved standing ovation.

And, then, of course, there was the afterparty – where I barely ate any of the lovely food that was available, despite being super hungry, because there were so many fun conversations to be had. Rob Paulsen, always a delight, mentioned a project he’ll soon be working on for which he’s been hired primarily as a singer (Hurrah!). Carlos Alazraqui shared that although Off the Curb is no longer in production at this time, he’s working on a new independent animated project that we may hear more about shortly. Jess Harnell introduced me to his lovely fiancée, Christine (Congrats! You guys are too cute!). Bill Farmer was happy to hear that I’d enjoyed his appearance on Rob Paulsen’s live show, and was all around the warmest, nicest human being you could possibly want to talk to. And so was Fred Tatasciore, who is happily less imposing in person than one of the main voices he’s known for, The Hulk.

I discovered that Tom Kenny is a most excellent conversationalist, of the sort one could talk with for hours; and if you are lucky enough to be in conversation with both Dan Povenmire and Dee Bradley Baker, you will automatically feel more intelligent just for being there, and probably learn something, too. It was great to talk with Maurice LaMarche again, who I’d last chatted with after midnight in a diner at Dragon Con (ah, conventions), and James Arnold Taylor, looking as dapper as when we met at SDCC. And of course it was wonderful to see John DiMaggio, Larry Shapiro, and Tommy Reid enjoying the success of the project they’ve poured so much of their time and energy into.

And to top it all off, I got to meet a couple of excellent Twitter friends in person, a.k.a. Hayley, and Kristy of Voice Chasers, who became my premiere-buddy for the evening, and also took some really great photos. I really couldn’t have asked for a better night.

And then… two days later… it was time to see John and the film again for the East Coast premiere, which I was happy to have put together at The National Press Club. We had a great crowd, and it was really neat to be able to experience a fan audience reacting to the documentary and laughing in all the right places. I don’t have to speculate as to whether they enjoyed the film because, at the end, they gave John and the film a standing ovation!

But before that, he also answered questions, about topics like <a href=”

the process of recording your lines with a cast or by yourself; the <a href=”

weirdness and wonderfulness of Adventure Time; and my favorite, what <a href=”

a conversation between Bender and Barry White would sound like. And then he talked about <a href=”

the origin of Barbados Slim and <a href=”

sang the Bacon Pancakes song while signing autographs for the fans. Whattaguy.

I know I’ve devoted several columns to this documentary over the past few months; but that’s only because it really is worth watching – so check it out this December, when it will be available on Video On Demand, iTunes, and DVD.

And until next time, Servo Lectio!

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

WEDNESDAY MORNING: Mike Gold

What time is it? It’s Thursday, so it must be time for Tweeks!

The Tweeks are back, reviewing the Adventure Time Vol. 1 Mathematical Ed. by Ryan North, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb, published by kaBOOM! Take a look! (more…)