Scary G-rated Movies

Posted on January 6, 2009 at 8:00 am

Emily Bazelon writes in Slate about the scariness of G-rated movies. Like several of the commenters on this site, she found The Tale of Despereaux scarier than she expected and so did her 5-year-old. Even though he had heard the audio book and knew the storyline, for at least a third of the time he “watched the movie with a pained expression and his hands over his ears. ”

Why, given this likely audience, did the moviemakers feel the need to include extended sequences with fear-pumping music; a giant menacing cat that charges after Despereaux in a gladiator ring; and Botticelli, the torture-obsessed leader of Rat World? And what’s the point of a G rating if movies like Despereaux fall into that category? This movie confirms my feeling that it’s past time to replace G with better age-tailored guidance. I remember sad G-rated kids’ movies from childhood: Disney classics like Pinocchio
, Dumbo, and Bambi. But my kids didn’t find “Bambi” distressing. Instead, what’s hard for them to handle are new movies, ostensibly created for their age group, from which they emerge metaphorically dripping in sweat, wrung out by an hour and a half of suspense and overexcitement.

Bazelon is looking for some mathematical formula to help her evaluate the movies she is considering for her children. But it is not that easy. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000 produced the utterly predictable conclusion that every one of the 74 G-rated movies they reviewed had at least some violence in it. That includes comic bops on the head and various kinds of mild peril as well as fights with weapons that conclude with fatal injuries.

The study found a total of 125 injuries (including 62 fatal injuries) in 46 (62%) of the films. Characters portrayed as “bad” were much more likely to die of an injury than other characters (odds ratio, 23.2; 95% confidence interval, 8.5-63.4). A majority of the violence (55%) was associated with good or neutral characters dueling with bad characters (ie, using violence as a means of reaching resolution of conflict), and characters used a wide range of weapons in violent acts.

Classic G-rated films from The Wizard of Oz (flying monkeys, Scarecrow set on fire, scary witch) to The Black Stallion (sinking ship, loss of a parent) as well as, yes, Pinocchio (another sinking ship, child turns into a donkey, characters swallowed by a whale), Dumbo (scary fire, mean bullies), and Bambi (death of mother, forest fire) have both scared and enchanted children for generations. And every generation thinks, as Bazelon does, that the new movies are just scarier. But that is not the problem.
The problem is that (1) every movie and every movie scare is different; it is almost impossible to say whether one movie is scarier than another in the same rating category in part because (2) every child is different. A child who handles the death of Bambi’s mother without blinking one week (seen at home, on a small screen) may be very disturbed a week later in a dark theater with a big screen seeing the mother of the princess die of shock after seeing a rat in her soup at the beginning of The Tale of Despereaux, a moment I (apparently incorrectly) expected to be more upsetting to children in the audience than the gladiator scene with the bound princess delivered to the hungry rats to be devoured (but rescued before they get even a nibble). Children’s developmental rates are uneven and unpredictable and you can never be certain how they will process the moments of peril and tension in a story.
I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t immediately tell you about some movie that they found traumatic as a child or teenager (I get the flying monkeys a lot). I take that seriously; after all, a large part of what I do here is help guide parents to give them the information they need to protect their children. And I urge parents to leave the theater or turn off the TV if they think children are unhappily frightened. But I realize, as all parents should, that one of the purposes of story-telling is to give us the opportunity to test our emotions and our responses and give us a sense of control over our inexpressible fears. Before there were scary movies there were scary fairy tales and nursery rhymes and before that there were scary stories around the campfire. The best we can do as parents is to protect our children when we can and teach them how to handle their fears when we can’t.

The Worst Movies of 2008 — but some of the Best Reviews

Posted on January 4, 2009 at 8:00 am

The Washington Post covers Rotten Tomatoes’ round-up of the year’s worst movies and what makes it fun to read is not just the list of what-were-they-thinking horrible films but the quotes from the reviews by the critics who suffered through them. My own pick for the worst film of the year is featured on Rotten Tomatoes along with the choices from Ben Mankiewicz, Roger Ebert, and others invited to participate by the RT editors.
Maybe it’s just a case of new year’s optimism but for me the good news from this article is less about the lousy movies (what did we expect from Paris Hilton, Uwe Boll, or those “Epic Movie” people?) that it is about the good work done by the critics who reviewed them. The movies may have been a waste of time but the reviews, as quoted on Rotten Tomatoes and in the Post, were not. Anguished, maybe, even angry at times, but often funny and always clever, thoughtful, and game.
It doesn’t take a critic to know that a movie is awful, but it can take a critic to help us understand how and why it is awful. The movie may not be fun to watch but the critic can make explaining why it is not fun to watch a lot of fun to read and, on a good day, we will learn something, too. And I give extra credit to the intrepid souls who make the effort to see the “cold opens,” the films that are not shown in advance to critics because the studios are certain they won’t get a single good review. They’re better prognosticators than they are film-makers; several of those cold opens ended up on the worst list including the dead last, “One Misssed Call,” which did not get a single good review.
I usually don’t mind seeing bad movies. The really horrible ones can be easier to watch than movies that are just dull and mediocre. My son and I used to joke that the motto of our movie-going club was “just because a movie is no good is no reason not to see it.” He has generously accompanied me to some legendary flops, including Catwoman and Battlefield Earth. It is often easier to write a good review of a bad movie than a good review of a great movie, and the Post article reminds us that terrible movies often inspire some very well-written complaints.
All of this is a good way to get ready for the first releases of 2009. The big prestige movies of December, released in time for awards consideration, are inevitably followed by the January left-overs. We normally don’t see much worth recommending until mid-February at the earliest. So this round-up of last year’s worst movies as reviewed by some of the best critics is a timely reminder to sharpen my metaphorical pencils and get ready to do my best to make reading about bad films as entertaining as I wish it had been to watch them.

The Sources of ‘Put a Ring on It’

Posted on December 30, 2008 at 11:00 am

The Steady Diet of Film blog has a brilliant analysis of the sources for BeyoncÃ©’s hit video, “Put a Ring on It.” It is not just wise and witty, it is an entertaining glimpse into the combination of mash-ups, wikis, and creative imagination that come together on the internet.

First there was Fosse. Bob Fosse choreographed a dance number for his one-time wife and all-time favorite dancer Gwen Verdon, to the song “Mexican Breakfast.”

Then someone combined the dance with DJ Unk’s “Walk It Out.”

This inspired the dance and look of “Put a Ring on It.”

And that inspired many, many, many, many tributes, parodies, and variations including Verdon/BeyoncÃ©, combining “Put a Ring on It” with the Verdon number and an SNL skit with Justin Timberlake.

Do Holocaust Movies Help Or Hinder Our Understanding?

Posted on December 28, 2008 at 8:00 am

Stuart Klawans, movie critic for The Nation for 20 years, has written a provocative essay about Holocaust movies for the website Nextbook.
Like so many other Jews, I have made my contribution toward the multiplication of Holocaust films. On New Year’s Eve 1985, I chose to spend my money at a movie theater, watching Part One of Shoah. A few years later, when asked in the wake of Schindler’s List how many more Holocaust films the world needed, I snapped, “We can stop at six million.”
But now, some dozen years and perhaps hundreds of movies later–in a season swollen with no fewer than six such releases–I respectfully request a moratorium on Holocaust films. By continually replaying and reframing and reinventing the past, these movies are starting to cloud the very history they claim to commemorate. Call it the law of diminishing returns–or call it a paradox that mirrors the Torah’s famously self-contradictory commandment at the end of Parshat Ki Tetze, concerning the people who were the prototype of Nazi Germany: “Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.” Very soon, with Holocaust movies, we’ll need to forget if we want to remember.
This issue has been on my mind as well. While others on Beliefnet have written approvingly about the recent film “The Boy in Striped Pajamas,” I found it to be superficial and manipulative. A lot of WWII movies are. As our world is increasingly troubling and complex, it is too easy to return to the Holocaust and portray Nazis as the last unambiguously evil villains, and just as important, unambiguously defeated. And yet, the very magnitude of the Holocaust requires a mosaic of stories for us to understand it even imperfectly.
According to Klawans, the number of Holocaust-related films is increasing as the few left who were there to witness it are dying out. He describes a recent screening of the upcoming film “Defiance,” based on the true story of The Bielski Partisans, three brothers who hid more than 1000 Jews from the Nazis. But it seems to me he makes a powerful point against his argument when he describes the reaction of the audience.
This audience, with its special moral authority, clearly did not care that the true story of the Bielski brothers was being filtered through calculated performances, invented speeches, dramatic conventions, and cinematographic effects. What mattered to them, as people irrevocably claimed by these events, was that their past was real, and so was the movie that acknowledged it.
This alone is a valid enough reason to make movies about the Holocaust, to reassure the survivors who saw so many stories lost forever that at least their stories will be told. We will not ever know all the more than six million stories of the Holocaust, but each succeeding generation has something to learn from the moral failings and moral triumphs of the era. That may not always mean dramatic re-enactments, however. The Holocaust movie I have found most insightful and affecting in recent years is Paper Clips, a touching documentary about a Holocaust curriculum in an almost all-white, all-Christian elementary school.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

Christmas Specials and Jewish Children

Posted on December 20, 2008 at 4:00 pm

December is a long month for Jewish parents. From the day after Thanksgiving until New Year’s Eve, America is completely saturated with Christmas and it can be very difficult to explain to small children why Santa seems to come to every house but theirs. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has a thoughtful essay on the fine distinctions drawn by some Jewish parents when it comes to cultural touchstones like “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” The semiotic lines parents draw between “The Grinch” (universally allowed) and “The Night Before Christmas” (not so much) are as much a reflection of the complex balance between making sure children do not feel like outcasts and preserving their cultural and religious identity as it is a reflection on the differences in the programs. Lithwick finds that the controlling principle seems to come down in favor of the programs watched by the parents when they were children, back when their own parents were faced with the same difficult choices.