May the schwartz be in the children's section

I don't remember a lot from seeing Spaceballs only once, when it first came out nearly 30 years ago (even though my list of movies seen multiple times says I've seen it again since then). But I do remember being taken aback, even at that time, that a movie that was rated only PG had the word "fuck" in it.

So you can imagine I was even more taken aback by finding Spaceballs in the children's section of the library this past week. You know, next to Shrek sequels and compendiums of episodes of Barney & Friends.

However, as it being located in this section was the thing that ultimately allowed me to borrow it, and finally see it for the second (or possibly third) time, I'm grateful enough for that gross error in judgment and taxonomy.

See, I was with my kids on just a brief visit to the Docklands library, which has a glorious harbor location and a full three floors stocked with state-of-the-art awesomeness. This branch has a great movie collection and I would have loved to visit the one intended for adults, but it's two floors up from the kids area, and every time I go up there with my kids, they act like lunatics and disturb the hushed, studious environment. The only solution I've found is to toss them in this neighboring room that's enclosed off from the rest of the area by glass doors, and features a ping pong table, to let them run around for ten minutes while I make my selections. Lately, however, there've actually been people playing ping pong in that room, and leaving a five-year-old and a two-year-old to get up to their shenanigans while these people are taking a break from studying has seemed like too much of a burden to saddle them with.

So I was just as glad to come away with a couple choices from the "kids" movies, among them Labyrinth (which I still haven't seen, though David Bowie's death has made it seem more important to do so) and Spaceballs.

I watched the movie Sunday night with almost a certainty that I had misremembered the "fuck," but with numerous drops of the words shit, asshole and bitch, I knew it was coming. And indeed, in the waning moments, George Wyner does unleash it, but in a more offhanded way than I had remembered.

I guess the placement in the children's section, if even intentional, is just another example of Australia's generally lax attitude toward language. After all, this is a country where people call each other cunts and mean it affectionately, and the cool radio station plays unedited gangsta rap with little more than a brief language warning before each song.

Setting aside the question of language, though, it's funny to think that someone would think this was really a movie intended for kids. Even a passing familiarity with the works of Mel Brooks would send off warning signs of its adult content, primarily sexual puns and other wordplay. Spaceballs even contains a couple shots of cleavage, one of which involves actual nuzzling -- though it's a pretty chaste form of nuzzling. I mean, the very title itself is designed to conjure images of testicles in the mind of the person hearing it.

The only thing I can conclude is that the classification was the brainchild of one of those extremely old and out-of-touch librarians straight from central casting, who balance pointy reading glasses on their noses while saying "It's one of those Star Wars movies, just throw it in the kids section." Its science fiction subject matter was certainly far more responsible for where it ended up on the shelves than the people making it. Just imagine someone putting Blazing Saddles or Dracula: Dead and Loving It in the kids section.

Sad to say, Spaceballs didn't bust my gut like I'd remembered it doing back in 1987, though thinking back now, I'd say that it probably didn't really bust my gut then either. The amount that I wanted to love this movie was definitely out of synch with how much I ended up loving it. Even then I suspect I found much of the humor limp, and 29 years has not done much to improve that, you won't be surprised to learn. I also remember finding Bill Pullman and Daphne Zuniga, both of whom I was encountering for the first time in this movie, a very poor man's version of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher -- which is of course what they were, but intentionally so. I didn't see it as intentional, and I definitely didn't think John Candy made a very good Chewbacca substitute.

So even though I wasn't really laughing at Spaceballs -- with a few notable exceptions -- I did sort of enjoy being in its company, both as a pleasing enough way to unwind after a night camping where I didn't get much sleep, but also just as a refresher on all these jokes that have come to be enshrined as classics. It ended up being full of moments I like or remember -- even though most of them now feel pretty obvious in their comedic mechanics.

And as for shelving it next to Ben Ten and Barbie's First Christmas ... well, fucked if I know.

PG: Too racy for TV

When I was a kid, I remember very clearly a friend of mine boasting to me that he had gone to see an R-rated movie in the theater with his father. We were something like 11, maybe even younger. Never wanting to be bested, I tried to one-up him by telling him I'd gone to see a PG movie without my parents. I think I knew my feat was considerably less impressive than his, but it was all I had to go on.

That was back when PG really meant parental guidance -- or so we thought at the time. There was no PG-13 rating (although there soon would be), so the Motion Picture Association of America theoretically allowed a lot more racy content into PG films than they would today.

Today, I feel like any movie rated PG is too vanilla by half. I'm not talking about animated films -- animated films are obviously a different story. You wouldn't expect many of them to get a PG-13 rating. But for live action, PG-13 seems like the minimum rating for a movie to intrigue me.

And so it was with a bit of surprise that I watched, a week ago now (it's been a busy week), Extraordinary Measures, the medical drama starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford. I noticed before the movie started that it was rated PG, "for thematic material, language and a mild suggestive moment." This sounded like the definition of vanilla to me. Considering the standard set by the "mild suggestive moment" -- a french kiss, maybe? -- I figured the language would consist of one of the characters saying "shucks" or "darn."

Nope. There were at least several "bullshit"s and I think exactly one "asshole."

Which means that Extraordinary Measures could not be shown on most television networks without being edited.

(For the record, the "suggestive moment" was Fraser and his wife, played by Keri Russell, being caught making out with most of their clothes still on.)

It got me thinking about the difference in decency standards we apply to the movies and to television. By anyone's assessment, Extraordinary Measures would be considered family-friendly entertainment. Sure, it's pretty serious in the sense that there are two children who have diseases with a 100% fatality rate. But the movie is made kind of like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, with the music swelling at all the right spots, and a definite sheen of appropriateness for the whole family. After all, it's a product of the film division of CBS, the squarest of all major networks. (And for the record, I thought it was nicely done for what it was.)

Yet it could not air on CBS without being edited. They might slip that "asshole" in there, but those "bullshit"s would have to go.

So why would a movie that almost any parent would show to their whole family be prevented from airing on network television in its original cut, while shows like the CSIs, where blood is spattering against the wall in every other shot, are given a pass? Even on CBS, the squarest and most wholesome of broadcast networks?

It's an interesting question, and makes me think again of Kirby Dick's thought-provoking documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Dick's film is an inside look at the MPAA rating body, a highly secretive organization that he tried to penetrate with private eyes and spy techniques, with only moderate success. Dick's film is more about the line between R and NC-17, how a flash of pubic hair in a movie can give it the latter rating, whereas a hundred decapitations would rest a movie comfortably in the former. But it asks interesting questions about the lines we draw in general, and why we draw them.

So let's look at the flip side of things, a show like AMC's The Walking Dead. The show does not shy away from almost any of the violence you would see in a cinematically released zombie movie. In fact, in the last episode I saw (we're going slowly through the season, relishing it on our DVR), human characters were seen driving pick-axes into the skulls of corpses, without the camera pulling away.

If released in the theater, The Walking Dead would almost certainly receive an R rating. Of course, it would also be full of f-bombs, which would make the decision easy. That's the curious way that TV has learned to manipulate its own standards for decency. These days, you can show almost anything in the way of blood and guts, as long as you put it late enough at night. But foul language -- language you might see in a PG-13 or even PG movie -- will get you booted from TV. Yeah, the basic cable networks can get away with the word "shit" (a limited number of times) and "asshole" (probably more, but it's a word that comes up less frequently in a normal script). The f-word is still off limits. But The Walking Dead is a funny example -- it's something we never would have seen on TV even just five years ago, or if we did, it would be on HBO. It's funny to see such gore alongside such relatively genteel language, because the language is the part that trips you up, not the seemingly more disturbing gory images.

In a way, though, the language standards have gotten stricter in the movies as they've gotten looser on TV. As recently as five years ago, shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad would never have been able to get away with the word "shit" -- now they can. On the other hand, the MPAA seems to be getting more conservative if anything. One of the first times I remember considering the language vs. rating issue was in Spaceballs, which came out in 1987 -- in other words, well into the PG-13 era. Spaceballs was given a PG rating, despite an incident where a character says the word "fuck." Would "fuck" even be permissible in a PG-13 movie today?

I don't know, it's just interesting to consider.