Not to get off on much of a wild tangent here, but I think the MPAA's rating restrictions have become too relaxed in the last 15 years or so. Films that would've once recieved an R rating without question, are now sneaking by with PG-13s, and even a few are being rated PG! Take Rush Hour for example. It was Rated PG-13 for action, violence, shootouts, and language. Well, in my opinion the film should have been rated R, mainly because of Chris Tucker's mouth. I lost count after the third use of God's name as a swear word, not to mention every other saying that popped up in the film. I understand the use of swearing to an extent, but IMO any use of God's name as a profane term should earn any film an automatic R rating, similar to how the "F-bomb" usually boosts a film's rating from PG to PG-13, or R if its more than once. In the case of Rush Hour, the shootouts should have pushed it towards an R rating even further.
As for other ratings issues, I don't think the descriptions are accurate enough. For example, the MPAA uses stuff like this: "Rated R for pervasive strong horror violence/gore, gruesome images, sexuality, drug use and language." This was used for Freddy vs. Jason, a film which I made the terrible mistake of seeing a few years ago, and will never watch again. I was hoping they'd take it back to the thriller-film roots of horror films in general...apparently the makers thought differently. To this day I still feel like throwing up because of this movie. For anyone who's seen it, you'll probably realize the only mention of sex in the descriptor is "sexuality". They should have used something like "repeated scenes of explicit sex and nudity." That was some really sick stuff, not to mention all the blood...which, by the way, they actually warned against properly. Why warn folks about buckets of blood, and practically ignore the sex factor? God as my witness, I hate it when films lure folks in with crap like that. I don't know anyone aged 25 that needs to see all that stuff (both sex and blood), let alone 17!!!
By contrast, in 1986 the MPAA gave a PG rating to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. This was the year that the PG-13 rating was established, and R had been around for a while, too. I was watching it again recently, and was shocked to discover how much swearing was in that film (a fact I hadn't noticed until now). Considering the lack of explicit sex, blood, gore, or violence, I'd have been satisfied with this earning a PG-13, although I don't believe there's a 13-year-old child in the world who should be exposed to repeated uses of God's name as a profane term. Just because the world at large says "It's okay, no big deal", doesn't mean it's the truth.
