“13 Million
Kids get bullied every year. Today, take a stand with me and @BullyMovie to
stop Bullying #BullyMovie”
If you saw
this or a similar tweet on Tuesday you weren’t the only one. March 27th
was "Anti-Bullying Twitter Tuesday" where the filmmakers of the new documentary
Bully asked Twitter followers and celebrities to speak out for the millions of
kids that are bullied and to protest the R rating the movie received from the
MPAA.
It wasn’t
just the filmmakers that wanted their documentary available to their highschool
target market, but the highschool students themselves. Katy Butler, a 17 year
old Michigan highschool student, was moved by the trailer. It resonated with
the bullying she herself had experienced. She knew that this movie had the
potential help. But when she found out that the movie was to be rated R and
unavailable to her and her peers she created a campaign on Change.org and
helped spread the word about the “Anti-Bullying Twitter Tuesday”. The campaign
swelled to nearly 500,000 petitioners by late March.
The campaign
reached out to Twitter celebrities as well and quickly received responses from celebrities
such as; Ellen DeGeneres, Channing Tatum, Ryan Seacrest and many others. The result,
Bully
now has a PG-13 rating. Check it out this Friday and let me know what you think - worthy of a PG-13 or R rating?
This campaign makes me wonder...
Is the rating
system still needed in a society with unrestricted access to content online?
Children and teens are able to view much worse than the Bully Movie on sites
like YouTube and Google, is the rating system too barbaric for digital society?
I have never
really respected the rating system, I trusted my parents to stop me from
watching movies that weren’t appropriate but now that I am older I don’t
understand the system at all, giving a movie a PG-13 rating just means that it
is going to suck and play down all important information or lack in
believability, giving a movie an R rating means limited viewers and thus a short
in sales.
In a society
where I can download a movie the theatre won’t let me watch because of rating,
I have to wonder who is the victim, the filmmakers or the fans? We either get
bad quality or limited distribution. What is your opinion of the rating system
for movies?
