More on the MPAA’s Bad Call on ‘The King’s Speech’

Posted on November 7, 2010 at 8:25 am

From the Hollywood Reporter with more on the controversy over giving “The King’s Speech” an R rating for a brief scene of bad language (in a vocal exercise):

Another Bad Call from the MPAA,” lamented influential Movie Mom blogger Nell Minow (daughter of FCC chairman Newton Minow, who gave the famous 1961 “vast wasteland” speech about TV). “I don’t think there’s any reason for the idiotic rules they have on language except that it’s so easily quantifiable,” Minow tells the Race. “The MPAA operates like a star chamber of secrecy and insularity.”

Minow submits four demands:
1. Transparency about who is on the board and what their backgrounds are.
2. Include some people with expertise in child development and media literacy and maybe the PTA or someplace like that.
3. Term Limits — those people have seen so many Saw movies they have lost their sense of what is appropriate.
4. Some right of appeal when a rating is clearly out of whack.

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