Media Violence-Movies

Media Violence

Movies

Articles/News

X-Men Movie Now Advertised To Tots. Ads for the PG-13 movie X2: X-Men United are running during Nickelodeon's Rugrats, a show aimed at children ages 2 through 11. Why? Because the movie studios can get away with it. “Like the little X-boy in the ad, Hollywood speaks with a forked tongue,” writes Philadelphia Inquirer movie critic Carrie Rickey.

In Mass Media Violence and Film Ratings, the American Medical Association has listed their current efforts to address the shortcomings in the current movie rating system.

Many G-rated movies also contain a surprising amount of violence, according to a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association. A May 2000 article on abcnews.com, Deceptively Innocent, describes the study as does a May 23, 2000 press release from the Harvard School of Public Health, Violence in G-rated Animated Feature Films.

PG-13 Movies in the Late-Bond Era: The Violence is Far Beyond What it Used to Be by Daphne White in The Washington Post, January 18, 2000 explores how the movie industry is working to get children into PG-13 and R rated movies.

The Boston Globe quoted Lion & Lamb Executive Director Daphne White in an in-depth June 2002 story on "ratings creep." You can also learn how to spot red flags in movie descriptions and previews to find out if a PG-13 movie should have been rated R; and don't miss an Op-Ed written by Nancy Carlsson-Paige explaining why The Bourne Identity (starring her son, Matt Damon) should be rated R instead of PG-13.

Family Film Definition Changing by George Thomas in The Beacon Journal, July 19, 2002, puts a twist on the phenomenon of “ratings creep.”
For a first-hand look at the struggle between artistry and social responsibility, read Confessions of a Violent Movie Writer by William Mastrosimone.
For views on why the issue of media violence is both a liberal and conservative cause, see Michael Massing's Movie Violence, Still Playing in The Washington Post, July 1999.

Resources

Kids-In-Mind
Movie critics who are also parents review movies and list all the scenes which parents might want to know about when deciding whether to let children view a particular movie.

National Institute on Media and The Family
This site features KidScore, an innovative and family-friendly ratings system for video and computer games as well as television and movies.
Movie Mom
The Movie Mom, Nell Minow, offers her own reviews and has links to several other movie review sites.

Research

A Validity Test of Movie, Television and Video-Game Ratings by David Walsh, Ph.D. and Douglas Gentile, Ph.D. in Pediatrics, Vol. 107, No. 6, June 2001. (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded for free, to view this article.)