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Every
week I get an email from my
local cinema telling me what's been released,
what's worth seeing, what certificate it is, all that
shit.
Now, something I've noticed more and more
over the last six months is that as well as the certificate,
it's now telling me what the film may contain, and
basically why it's been given the certificate it has.
I think it was both "Harry Potter" and "Lord
of the Rings" that started the trend when they
were released last November, because they were PG,
but had things that could be scary for really young
kids. (Of course, the idea that really young kids
might not sit through 2.5+ hours of either film sort
of passed people by) And now they seem to be on every
film.
But why do we need them? I mean, up 'til
about a year ago, it was pretty simple - 12 was for
kids of 12 and above, and might contain a couple of
naughty words, that kind of thing; 15 was likely to
be more sweary, more violent, maybe even some nudity;
and 18 was pretty much anything goes - OK, the Film
Censorship people still had some guidelines (some
fairly strange - for instance headbutts are still
very much a no-no which is weird, but there we go)
but you'd get some pretty explicit vioence and sex,
and swearing's virtually de rigeur.
But just a look at this week's email reveals listings like :
- Signs (12A - Contains moderate violence and menace.)
- Lantana (15 - Contains strong language and moderate sex.)
- Reign Of Fire (12A - Contains moderate violence, language and fantasy horror.)
Now, none of this is exactly a revelation - 15 certificate contains strong language and moderate sex? (And on a tangemt, what the hell is moderate sex? Sex with only one other person involved? Where you only go for 15 minutes?) Now there's a fucking shock - I'd never expect sex and swearwords in a 15certificate.
Reign of Fire contains fantasy horror - a film about Dragons? You think?
What kind of nation are we turning into? We need to be warned explicitly (Hur-hur-hur, he said explicit. *snigger*) about rude words, nudity, and violence? The fucking certificates show what the film's likely to contain - why the hell do we need to be told exactly what's in it? Can't people make their own judgements any more? We're heading towards (hell, we're probably there already) a nanny state where we're told what's OK, we don't have to think about it too much, form up our own concepts, we can just let the State do it for us. Maybe that's paranoid, I don't know, but it certainly seems to be the way we're headed. Maybe George Orwell was right with 1984, just 30 years early.
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