Nell Minow: March 2008 Archives

Cheryl Sherry's column in the Appleton Post-Crescent discusses a new survey showing that PG movies with strong language sell fewer tickets than those with other kinds of parental concerns like violence or sex.

"The reality is that profanity, within PG, is the big demarcation between box office winner and box office loser," research and marketing director Dan O'Toole told attendees at ShoWest, a conference where studios unveil upcoming movie lineups. "Parents are choosing PG films for their kids that have very, very low levels of profanity. We're talking one-third the level of the average PG film," he said.

Sherry called me for comment, and her column describes my background and approach and some of my thoughts on the rating system:

Minow, who has testified before the Federal Trade Commission on the MPAA's rating system, said "overwhelmingly its biggest failing is they will give material a pass in a comedy they'd give a much higher rating to in a drama. So you have these movies like the Austin Powers movies getting a PG-13 rating, which have really, really raunchy humor. … Just because the MPAA is ratcheting down it's system, doesn't mean I have to follow suit."

PG-13 has become the no-man's land of the rating system, [Minow] added. "Many parents will shrug their shoulders and say, my 10-year-old is bright and can handle a PG-13. … But you do not know what you are getting. There can be PG-13s that are almost PG and there can be PG-13s that should be Rs."

Happy Baseball Season! I am not sure why baseball has inspired more great movies than any other sport. There are wonderful choices for every age and interest, from musical (Damn Yankees) to fantasy (Angels in the Outfield -- I prefer the original to the remake), from the most adult romance (Bull Durham) to the historical -- and heartbreaking (Eight Men Out). And then there are the weepy classics: Field of Dreams and Bang The Drum Slowly.

This week, I'm recommending a great baseball film for families: "The Sandlot." In the 1960s, a boy whose mother has just remarried moves to a new town and begins to make friends when he joins in a sandlot baseball game. The boy’s challenges include developing some baseball skills, trying to achieve a comfortable relationship with his new stepfather (Dennis Leary), and finding a way to triumph over “The Beast” (a junkyard dog) and the bigger, tougher kids who challenge his friends to a game. All are well handled in this exceptionally perceptive story of growing up. NOTE: Some gross-out moments (which most kids will enjoy). And one of the boys pretends to be drowning to get a kiss from a beautiful lifeguard. Play ball!

"CJ7" is the story of a little boy named Dicky who struggles with school bullies, extreme poverty, tough homework, a girl who likes him, a different girl that he likes, problems communicating with his father (writer-director Stephen Chow), and an uncooperative extra-terrestrial super-pet. Dicky is played by the very talented Jiao Xu, who was selected after Chow auditioned nearly 10,000 children for the role. It did not concern Chow that Jiao Xu had almost no professional experience. And it did not concern him that Jiao Xu is a girl.

Some directors in that situation would rewrite the part to make the character a girl. Chow just cut off Jiao Xu's hair and dressed her as a boy.

The performing arts have a long tradition of gender-switching. There are female-to-male gender disguises in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," "As You Like It," and "The Merchant of Venice." The top two on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American comedies of all time are about male-to-female gender-switches, "Tootsie" and "Some Like it Hot." But these are based on letting the audience in on the secret. The fact that the viewers know something that the characters do not is the essence of the story's appeal. Because we know who and what the characters really are, the story can explore some of our assumptions and expectations about gender roles. And because we are experiencing it vicariously we enjoy the pleasure of watching the complications that arise from the misunderstandings and embarrassments.

But Jiao Xu is not playing a girl pretending to be a boy. Her real-life gender has nothing to do with the story-line. Chow expects that no one will notice and that we will just believe she is a boy the same way we believe her character is poor and has an outer-space pet. Nor is he making a statement about gender and identity as Todd Haynes did by casting six different actors, male, female, young, old, white, and black as his Bob Dylan character in "I'm Not There" or as Todd Solondz did in "Palindromes," where eight different performers of different ages, genders, and races all portrayed a 13-year-old girl.

It may be that Chow did not want to change Dicky into a girl character because he thought audiences would react differently to some of the humiliations Dicky suffers in the film. But that is our issue, not his. Chow is not trying to break through boundaries; he is just ignoring them.

To make things even more complicated, there is the character of Maggie, the schoolgirl who has a crush on Dicky. Maggie is played by very large adult male with tiny little barrettes in his hair. Even though no one in the audience will miss the fact that actor Han Yong Wua is neither a child nor female, everyone will accept him as Maggie the way we accept Jiao Xu as Dicky, Meryl Streep with an accent, Ellen Page pretending to be pregnant, or Tyler Perry as Medea. Chow wanted Maggie to be big because her size makes a striking visual image and because it emphasizes Dicky's subjective view of the scary prospect of the girl with a crush enlarged for comedic effect. To him, she appears to be the size of an ATM and the ground literally shakes when she walks. When she pushes the school bully, he snaps backwards as though he was fired from a slingshot.

Chow enjoys tweaking and even subverting familiar formulas. As in his previous films, "Kung Fu Hustle" and "Shaolin Soccer," Chow creates a dizzying mash-up of sentiment and slapstick that some audiences will find unsettling but others will find refreshing. Although it is a story about a child with an inter-galactic pet, it is not the usual cozy heart-warmer. It is rated PG but it includes an epithet not permitted on broadcast television, "rude humor" that has Dicky pelted with space poop, and "thematic material" like corporal punishment and [spoiler alert] what appears to be the devastating death of a child's only surviving parent.

Dicky's first venture away from home with his new friend from outer space plays charmingly into the kind of magical empowerment we expect, with some delightfully imaginative special effects, only to turn into a "gotcha" moment as we and Dicky find out that the powers and motives of a space creature may not be what we thought.

Perhaps Chow's central theme is elasticity, whether of the material world, with his cartoonishly exaggerated bending of physical reality or of what we think of as the parameters of genre and narrative. Or, more likely, he just thinks a very large girl who happens to be played by a man standing next to a very small boy who happens to be played by a girl makes a very funny sight.

"Miss Bimbo" is an online site popular with little girls in England, France, and Japan that bills itself as the "first virtual fashion game." It encourages them to "Become the most famous and beautiful bimbo in the world." They can accomplish this by having their personal "bimbo" diet (until recent protests, this included the "purchase" of diet pills) and get cosmetic surgery or a wealthy boyfriend. This game makes Barbie and the Bratz look like Hillary Clinton. Parents should exercise caution to make sure that Webkins-savvy children do not wander over into this site.

Many thanks to the Jezebel site for bringing this to my attention.

Two of the best performances of the year so far were given by Victor Rasuk in "Stop Loss" and Melonie Diaz in "Be Kind Rewind." Both got their start in a little-seen independent film called a "minor miracle" by Salon movie critic Stephanie Zacharek, "Raising Victor Vargas." The young actors share their names with their characters, and the film has an intimate, improvised, documentary feel as it explores their struggles to find themselves and make connections. Watch for another supremely natural performance from first-timer Altagracia Guzman as the grandmother. Winner of Independent Spirit awards for direction and first screenplay, this is a quiet gem of a movie. I am delighted to see Rasuk and Diaz continuing to grow as performers and look forward to seeing what they do next.