Film Why Pay Premium Cinema Prices…
posted by on April 30 at 11:39 AM
…when you can read hilariously thorough synopses of today’s top films for free at KidsinMind.com?
The site’s stated mission:
The purpose is to provide parents and other adults with objective and complete information about a film’s content so that they can decide, based on their own value system, whether they should watch a movie with or without their kids. We make no judgments about what is good or bad or anything else. We are not affiliated with any political party, any cultural or religious group, or any ideology. The only thing we advocate is responsible, engaged parenting.
It’s a perfectly noble goal, carried out with scientific precision, with every reviewed film dissected for Sex/Nudity, Violence/Gore, Profanity, and Substance Use. The resulting text makes for some good, weird reading, as every “adult” component of a film is spelled out plainly. (The voluminous cataloguing of Sex/Nudity in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay ranges from “A man is shown masturbating under sheets (we see rhythmic movement and then see a spurt of semen hit his face)” to “A young man’s arm accidentally grazes a young woman’s clothed breast,” and “A man massages a woman’s ankle.”)
Best of all are the final messages presented for each film.
Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: “Revenge is not always the answer to pain. 19th century London was an awful place.”
The Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light: “If you love what you do, you can achieve excellence and longevity. Music is about feeling and teamwork.”
Juno (in which “A young man is shown in running shorts in several scenes (bare legs to the thigh)”): “Love is hard work. Parents seem to assume that teenagers are not sexually active, when in reality they are.”
Jenna Jameson’s Zombie Strippers (whose vast Sex/Nudity roundup reads like porn written by a computer): “Zombies can do anything.”
Explore for yourself here. (And parents: Don’t let my camp appreciation of the site deter you from availing yourselves of its offerings, which really do lay out every single potentially objectionable detail for a given movie, from come-splattered faces to caressed ankles.)
Thanks to MetaFilter for the heads-up.
Well. I'm definitely not going to take my 7 y/o niece to see Zombie Strippers now.
Two women kiss, and one says, "I love you" and "take me"; they then move to the floor, off-screen, and we hear crunching.
From Pulp Fiction "there are several very explicit discussions of sex, and, most importantly, a man is shown being raped by another man"
Well I'm glad that they at least see the importance of man on man rape!
Some of the interpretations of scenes of JUNO are hilariously off-base. The slow dance WAS VERY SEXUAL!
Wonderful summary of Expelled:
MESSAGE - Science is evil. Darwin's Theory of Evolution made the Holocaust possible.
The Christian Science Monitor has been listing the moral issues in their movie reviews all along. Except for their daily article on Christian Science which you can (and should) ignore, it is the best paper out there.
Those "final messages" sound like they were written by the same people who create the hilariously meaningless English-language t-shirts in Japan.
Thanks, Mark at 6, but KidsinMind doesn't deal with "moral" issues--it explicitly avoids moralizing. (For instance, they don't say lesbian zombie cannibal sex is wrong, just that it exists in Zombie Strippers.)
What, no sample commentary on Showgirls?
Under substance use in Baby Mama: "Woman is seen taking large vitamin". My mamma encourages my vitamin use. Enabler.
Is it possible that you are not familiar with the long-standing "screenit.com" site?
@8 I apologize for plopping "Sex/Nudity, Violence/Gore, Profanity, and Substance Use" under the simple catch-all name of "moral issues". The CSM also simply enumerates these in the review and allows you to determine for yourself if they are "moral" issues. They don't moralize either. The fact remains that these events are counted and enumerated so that people with "moral" hangups can make a decisions on whether to see a movie or not and who to bring. They aren't counting the number of time each says "the" after all.
And if you -really- want comedy, try CapAlert, the ">ChildCare Action Project: Christian Analysis of American Culture.
A quote from CapALert's review of Superhero Movie:
"The males pumping women's breasts did not help the scoring, either. Nor did the men atop women in beds. Nor did the motions and gestures of intercourse. Nor did the oral sex innuendo. Nor did the homosexual inferences/suggestions. Nor ... [Eph. 5:4, Gal. 5:19, 1 John 2:26]"
Doh. Sorry about that malformed URL. Hope I didn't break the SLOG. I meant to preview it, not post it.
Y'all need to back off. This site is fantastic. The summaries are balanced, evenhanded, and non-judgmental.
If I had a kid who wanted to see Good Luck Chuck I'd much rather know there's a scene where "A man enters a room where another man who is nude and in profile is masturbating with a grapefruit and then talking about using a brush to stimulate his prostate" without having to actually watch Good Luck Chuck.
the review for eyes wide shut is amazing, the best part being the final message.
The description of Kinsey reads like a long, thorough textbook of scandalous things. I haven't read 1920's erotica written for flappers, but I imagine it to be roughly like the summary for Kinsey.
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