I is for Incel?

A couple years ago I wrote a post about how The Shawshank Redemption was the #1 movie on IMDB, and how that made me self-conscious about my own affection for it. I may not have used these exact words at the time I wrote the post (I could go back and read it I guess), but what I meant to say at the time was that Shawshank was the equivalent of an arthouse movie for comic book nerds. Or maybe not so much an arthouse movie, since the people I am broadly generalizing about would have no use for the arthouse in this broad generalization I’m making. But instead, maybe it was a movie they knew counted as a “good movie” that didn’t have men in capes in it. Even comic book nerds being broadly generalized about know that they can’t only like movies with men in capes.

But now I’m wondering if my preconceived notions about IMDB users has a darker edge than I originally thought.

If you haven’t heard, Joker crossed into the top ten movies of all time on IMDB over the weekend. It must have been a brief incursion only, as maybe more people saw and rated the movie to bring its average score down a bit, perhaps even as a reaction to the news that it had reached that height. But it’s still knocking on the door of that chart’s hallowed top ten at #11, with an average user rating of 8.8/10.

I’m not sure how IMDB does its calculations, but I’d guess there’s a greater likelihood of a film nudging into the top ten based on an initial burst of enthusiasm, one that is typically tempered over time by a more measured approach to ranking. Or, in other words, the movie starts getting seen by the people who are not inclined to love it, and they rank it accordingly. If Joker is anywhere near this ranking two years from now, I will be very surprised.

But for it to even make it near or close to the top ten at any point in its existence means that it has to be a pretty acclaimed movie, right?

Er, no, actually.

I learned about it reaching this peak before I saw it on Saturday afternoon, and when I didn’t like it so much (that opinion may get even more negative the more I sit with it), I figured it must be yet another “me problem.” As with films like the recent Ad Astra (don’t get me started), I felt like I must have seen a very different movie than the vast majority of people.

Actually, many people – or many critics, anyway – saw the same movie I did.

Joker has a fairly lethargic 59 on Metacritic. That breaks down to 32 positive reviews, 15 mixed reviews and 11 negative reviews. So more positive than negative – hence the 59 – but only six more positive reviews than those characterized as mixed or negative combined. And even with some perfect scores of 100 mixed in there, it looks like the Venice Film Festival was more the anomaly than what we should expect from other awards bodies as the year goes on.

IMDB is a different story. On IMDB, Joker would have an 88, using approximately the same scale as Metacritic.

So that begs the question: Why is IMDB’s user base so different from the user base of critics?

I’ve suggested what I think it might be in the provocative subject I’ve used for this post. Is this, indeed, the Incel Movie Data Base?

For you to follow me on this one, we have to make what I acknowledge are a couple stretches in our logic. First we have to say that comic book nerds are disproportionately represented among IMDB’s users, which may not be the case. There’s reason to suggest it may be, though. Even 11 years after its release, another film featuring the Joker, The Dark Knight, is still #4 on IMDB, behind only Shawshank and the first two Godfathers. Two Lord of the Rings movies appearing in the top 12 bolsters the notion that people steeped in nerd culture are heavily represented.

Then we have to make the assumption that some significant percentage of the people who like Joker, like it because they feel like it is a call to violence for incels. Incels, of course, being short for “involuntary celibates,” who are considered to be a group of people prone to shooting up a school or shopping mall because the girl they like doesn’t like them. Of course, not everyone who’s unlucky with the ladies is going to shoot up a mall, but people who characterize themselves as incels are probably a lot more likely to do so. That it incites us to violence is not the only or probably not even the primary reason a person would like Joker, but to say it is no factor at all is probably not correct either, and to say the targets of this incitement are not incels is to overlook some of the ways the film is coded.

Then you have to say that there is a meaningful crossover between people who think of themselves as comic book nerds and people who think of themselves as incels. There would be some, of course, but as with anything, it’s more of a “few bad apples” scenario.

If you do go with me on all this, though, my query about the Incel Movie Data Base makes a little more sense.

Of course, as someone who doesn’t like Joker and thinks it puts bad things into the world, I’m going to question the perspective of a person who does – or their willingness to overlook some of its more problematic elements. But it could be very rational, non-violent thinkers who find the film’s filmmaking or acting first rate (they can be), or instead see a criticism of fatcats like Donald Trump. That’s in there too, which makes the messaging of this film ambiguous to say the least. Although I like it when a film can be interpreted differently by different people, in this case it feels sort of dangerous. It feels like another way it's difficult to grasp an "absolute truth" in this day and age.

But it's not a bully like Donald Trump who gets a gun and kills a bunch of people, his comments about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue notwithstanding. It's the victim of that bully. 

As I wade further and further into this post I realize I am not going to end with a totally coherent thought that I can fully defend. I suppose it takes a piece of art with some value to spin a critical thinker in circles, so they can never fully articulate their thoughts, and have to go back to just trusting the feeling they get from the art.

So Joker is that kind of art: provocative, conversation starting. Art like that should always exist.

But if Joker is engendering passionate fans, it hardly seems likely that they are most passionate about Joaquin Phoenix’s acting, or how Todd Phillips sets up a camera. It seems likely that the passion is coming from the film’s core ideas. And I feel like the uprising of the Joker is more a glorification of the loners who always felt that they were misunderstood, who might think about going to get a gun, than a criticism intended for people who feel forgotten and left behind by the rich. That second idea is put forward on a narrative level, but I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.

Not as deep as the accumulation of hate and disgust felt by mentally ill victims who see no other solution than to rise up and kill everybody.

That's not my reductive view of people with mental illness. It's the movie's. 

Incels, your hero scares me, and your apparent quantity scares me even more.

And I really hope I’m getting all this wrong.

Don't cry over spilled money

The following post contains spoilers for Triple Frontier.

I don't think of myself as a materialistic person. I can let go of money pretty easily, and don't tend to buy anything that qualifies as a trophy or an object of its own inherent worth. I haven't made a single decision in my career that has been focused on the acquisition of any more money than I already have. Why do you think I tried to make it for a while as a paid film critic?

All that said, few things upset me more in a movie than the loss, destruction or wanton dispersal of money.

I suppose I'm exaggerating with my language here. Plenty of things upset me more, like disease, mass death or the death of a child. Of course those things.

But few inconsequential things bother me more than when a box full of millions of dollars explodes and the tattered bills flutter down into the ocean.

That's an actual example from Lethal Weapon 2, which was the first time I noticed this bothering me. I haven't seen that movie in ages, but I clearly remember that a ton of cash is scattered to the winds and water in the finale. It made me ill. I mean, not really, but it made me shake my head slowly in sorrow.

Among the plenty of other examples, another comes to mind. That's The Dark Knight, where to prove how much he is governed by the insane principles of anarchy, the Joker stacks what seems like a billion dollars and sets it aflame. Just because.

In Triple Frontier, which I watched last night, it happens like nine different times. And here's where the spoilers begin.

The first instance is the burning of the drug lord's safe house, where the team of retired special ops soldiers has found hundreds of millions of dollars in the walls, a la the dead bodies in Sicario only more valuable. Because of their short window of opportunity, they can only take what they have the time to dig out, leaving untold millions going up in smoke.

Then there's their escape through the Andes by helicopter. Because of the extra cash they gathered, the helicopter can't support the full weight of their booty and also reach the necessary altitudes to clear the mountains. They therefore have to toss a number of duffel bags down from the interior of the chopper into the jungle to reduce the strain on the aircraft.

This isn't enough, though, and a gearbox explodes, leaving the helicopter in a position to crash land. In order to allow for the landing, they have to drop the net bag carrying the vast majority of their ill-gotten gains. This is largely recovered, but in the moment it was another head-shaking loss of funds.

As they are traversing a very thin ledge through the mountains, one of the mules carrying several bags containing probably tens of millions loses its footing and goes down the side of the mountain. This is the shot that most closely resembles the shot in Lethal Weapon 2, as the bills billow out and fall to the distant ground like so much confetti. To show what good guys they are (the film really waffles on this one), they take a moment to mourn the loss of the mule as well.

As it's extremely cold and the guys have no other reasonable kindling, they also burn some of the money. This struck me as the least believable case of loss/destruction in the whole film, given that greed has motivated almost everything they have done to this point. (Another area where the film waffles.)

Lastly, when they are facing huge odds as vengeful locals wait for them with machine guns, they must reduce their burden to only what they can carry in their backpacks, throwing the rest of the money down into the bottom of a ravine.

By the end of this I was almost numb.

I'm overstating this a bit, and besides, some of the money that's "lost" is not destroyed or unrecoverable -- it'll just be recovered by South American locals who surely deserve it more.

Still, I was triggered.

Good thing I myself have never lost more than $20 here and there. I don't know how I'd handle it.

Measures of duality

On Friday night I was reading my six-year-old from his series of books about Zac Power, the 12-year-old super spy, as we are wont to do. I've noticed the phenomenon I'm about to tell you about plenty of times before, but had occasion to contemplate it anew during the reading of the book Sand Storm, in which one of Zac's chief rivals appears.

The rival in question is a 12-year-old girl named Caz. Get it? Caz? Zac? Zac? Caz? Zac works for the good spy agency called GIB, while Caz works for the bad spy agency called BIG. Get it? BIG? GIB? GIB? BIG?

But you haven't heard all of it yet. Caz' last name is Rewop. That's right. Rewop. Power. Power. Rewop. Zac Power. Caz Rewop.

It'll go right over most kids' heads -- my son hasn't commented on it yet, anyway -- but for adults, it's a stupidly obvious application of the notion that the hero and villain are two sides of the same being. They're not opposites -- the opposite of the name Zac Power would not be Caz Rewop, but, I don't know, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Rather, they are mirror images of each other, having more in common than they have different. In fact, in extreme instances, you might argue that the only thing they don't share in common is their respective morality. Even then, though, the creator of these characters likes to emphasize the bad in the good character and the good in the bad.

It was interesting timing, then, that the movie I was watching that night also engages in a sort of literal exploration of the hero-villain duality.

Last Days in the Desert is the latest film from writer-director Rodrigo Garcia, and it couldn't portray a more symbolic struggle between good and evil if it tried. In the film Ewan McGregor plays both Jesus Christ and the Devil, who tempted him during his 40 days in the desert. Garcia makes the things they have in common manifest by having the same actor play both roles. If the side of Jesus that tempts him is personified as the Devil, I suppose to balance things out we'd also need to see the just side of the Devil as portrayed here. That complicates the duality a bit but I think the principle of the thing still holds.

If this were a children's story about super spies, I suppose his name would be Susej Tsirhc rather than the Devil, but I digress.

Garcia's rather on-the-nose choice is meant to allow one actor to explore both sides of a characterization, and theoretically give us something profound. McGregor is reasonably good in the film without quite attaining that level of achievement. So the film is worth watching but nothing extraordinary. McGregor might as well have a mini angel McGregor on one shoulder and a mini devil McGregor on the other, both advising him on what to do.

Perhaps the biggest "disappointment" about it, if you want to look at it that way, was the fact that it was shot by Emmanuel Lubezki and does not actually look mind-blowingly good. It looks good, but not mind-blowingly.

An interesting thing happened while I was watching it, though, that makes the thoughts I was already having about Zac Power and Jesus Christ and writing this post all the more eerie.

At about the halfway point of the film, I was getting really sleepy and I decided it was time for a bit of a sugar wake-me-up in the form of ice cream.

Not "about" the halfway point, though. At the halfway point.

Going over to my computer, which was tethered to the television via an HDMI cable, to press pause on iTunes, I then discovered that I had paused on exactly the halfway point of the film. There had been 49:51 that had already elapsed and there was 49:51 left to go. You could say I planned it, but when you're watching something in iTunes, the time remaining only displays when you run your cursor over the progress bar. There's no alternate method to track the minutes ticking away -- or none that I know of, anyway.

So I managed to split the movie right down the middle, into a duality of its own running time.

Even stranger was what happened about five minutes after that midway point. Another character who fancies riddles says to Jesus, "How far can a man walk into the desert? Only halfway. After that he's walking out." Probably just another way the movie is conscious of its own duality. But it had a special coincidental significance for me, given how I had just paused after walking exactly halfway into the movie, after which I was walking out of it.

I thought I'd leave you with five other explicit considerations of the duality between hero and villain, good and evil. Listed in the order I thought of them.

1) Oh God, You Devil! (1984, Paul Bogart) - The third in George Burns' series of Oh God! movies features Burns as both God and the Devil, much like in Friday night's movie. Though I don't think anything other than Borscht Belt comedy was being explored here.

2) Superman III (1983, Richard Lester) - Even at the best of times, Superman has a dual personality that includes another side of himself -- the Clark Kent side. Usually, both sides are good. In the third Superman movie, though, they explored an evil Superman, one corrupted by kryptonite -- and one who actually fights Clark Kent. I don't remember how they managed to get them into separate corporeal bodies -- I think there was a bit more suspension of disbelief than usual on that one -- but I do remember their extremely bizarre junkyard battle for control of their soul.

3) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson) - There's also a struggle for the soul of the man once known as Smeagol, now the twisted troll called Gollum. To emphasize this, Jackson uses a technique whereby the two sides of the character -- one kind and one cruel -- have a conversation with one another on how to handle the two travelers Gollum has just met. Although only one being is actually present, Jackson gives a standard shot-reverse shot setup as though there are two conversing.

4) The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan) - Back to superhero movies, one of the most commonly referenced instances of hero-villain duality is between Batman and the Joker, though in this case they look nothing like each other. However, there's a direct symbol of the two sides of a character's personality within The Dark Knight, and that's the very brief appearance of Two Face, known as Harvey Dent before he is disfigured and corrupted. The coin flip that is part of his MO -- which usually decides the fate of a prospective victim -- could also decide which version of him you're getting. But truly, the Dent side isn't there anymore, only symbolically represented by the failure to kill somebody instead of killing them.

5) Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze) - And though I should end with something from Hitchcock, I couldn't find anything that literalized the theme in the way I'm going for here. So let's finish with a movie I alluded to on this blog only yesterday -- giving us one final coincidence with the Zac Power reading/viewing of Last Days in the Desert. In order to literally explore the dormant half of his personality, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (appearing as a character here, played by Nicolas Cage) introduces a brother character named Donald, who is everything he isn't -- gregarious, mainstream, moronic, successful. In this case it's not really good and evil Kaufman is exploring, though -- he intermingles aspects of both in each personality, and toys with his own perception of which is which.

For more examples, check out, oh, the rest of western literature and cinema.

Too intense for impressionable minds?

I knew I had to write something about The Dark Knight Rises today.

Informally the holiest release date on the 2012 calendar, July 20th could not pass without me addressing the phenomenon in some way on The Audient.

At first I was going to write another post about how I was all "geeked out," how the anticipation for The Dark Knight Rises had caused a huge amount of personal backlash for me. Then I was going to write about how I had grudgingly accepted that I was more curious about it than I liked to admit, as I had surprised myself by leaning in and listening to a review of the movie by Bob Mondelo on NPR in the kitchen last night, despite the fact that my son was creating an awful din in the background. (And despite writing yesterday that I preferred to avoid reviews of movies before seeing them, unless it was inconvenient for me to do so.)

But driving in to work this morning, I heard that a gunman had walked into a multiplex in Aurora, Colorado last night and opened fire during a midnight premiere of the movie, killing 12 (so far) and injuring an unfathomable 50 others. He was supposedly wearing a riot helmet, bulletproof vest and goggles. He started the whole thing by tossing a gas canister, presumably just to create confusion and a cinematic backdrop for his killing spree.

So now I'm writing about something I'm wondering about, not for the first time:

Are Christopher Nolan's Batman movies too intense for people with a hazy understanding of the difference between right and wrong? Or, perhaps, with an active disdain for that difference?

It's not overstating things to say that Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and now The Dark Knight Rises have presented some of the darkest flavors of villain we have ever seen at the movies. It's been long enough since I've seen Batman Begins that I can't recall the level of sadism of the Scarecrow, as played by Cillian Murphy. But Heath Ledger's Joker has become legendary for his amoral sense of anarchy. He derived much of his power from the fact that you could not ascribe ordinary criminal motivations to him, a fact he demonstrated amply by burning a stack of money that surely totaled in the tens of millions. One of his other calling cards was that he would do simply anything, no matter how horrifying or cruel, a fact he demonstrated amply by blowing up a hospital.

I have specifically not learned very much about Batman's new nemesis, Bane (Tom Hardy), but his appearance alone suggests he subscribes to the same school of chaos as the Joker and (to a lesser extent) the Scarecrow before him. 

Undeniably, one of the most visceral effects of these movies is the way Nolan hasn't flinched from staring deep into the soul of evil. What has catapulted them to the level of greatness accorded them by their fans is that moment when those viewers first felt the envelope being pushed past the point of turning back. Unlike most "safe" superhero movies they had seen before, these movies were going to have real blood, real death, real horror. No one's intelligence was going to be insulted, and no one was safe. Even "the girl" might die -- suddenly, horribly, in the middle of the movie.

You might say that what Nolan has presented on screen is toxic for the wrong type of person with a fragile type of mind. In fact, come to think of it, I'm kind of surprised that more high-profile mischief has not been inspired by Ledger's no-holds-barred portrayal of the Joker. I don't know that your average deranged movie fan has the wherewithal to blow up a hospital, but I'm surprised more people haven't tried that trick of slamming someone's face down into an upward-pointing pencil.

What's more dangerous than any individual act dramatized in these movies (let's be honest, we're really talking about The Dark Knight) is the sociopathic mindset Nolan endorses. And by "endorse," I certainly don't mean to suggest that Nolan believes the Joker is his hero, or that any of his actions would be acceptable under any circumstances. More than anything I mean that by merely presenting such extreme actions as something somebody could do, he may be unintentionally birthing copycats. It's like how people worry that Hollywood movies about terrorism will accidentally be giving real terrorists real ideas about how to effectively commit their terrorism.

It's easy to see how the maliciousness, the instability, the downright derangement presented in Nolan's Batman movies could concoct themselves into a dangerous stew in the brain of an unhinged person. And it seems reasonable to assume that this deadly stew was percolating in the brain of James Holmes, as he (allegedly) walked into that Colorado theater last night and started shooting. For someone like James Holmes, Nolan had made it all too easy for life to imitate art. He had inadvertently created the conditions where that imitation would not only be possible, it might actually be probable.

Purely in terms of the business of movies, I wonder what effect this incident will have on the opening weekend of The Dark Knight Rises. Surely, most rabid fans will not be deterred by the possibility of a copycat. But some might. And I know at least one friend who has tickets for a show tonight, who will probably read this before he goes, who must be distantly wondering whether Nolan's movies may bring a sociopath out of the shadows and into his theater.

A trio of thefts

In terms of reveals of sequel titles, the biggest recent news out of Hollywood was the name of the third Batman movie, due out in July of 2012: The Dark Knight Rises. For those who didn't like the similarity of that title to 2008's The Dark Knight, use the Indiana Jones movies as your reference point. The first movie had its own kind of title (Raiders of the Lost Ark), then a different naming convention took over and continued to rule (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). (And let's ignore the fact that some people have tried to go back and retroactively rename Raiders so it fits the formula: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

Anyway, before I get lost in one of my famous tangents ... my own biggest recent sequel title news, in terms of giving me a blog topic, was yesterday, when I learned about the title of the new Transformers movie:

Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Really?

I laughed, just as I had laughed over titles like The Phantom Menace and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It sounds a bit goth, doesn't it?

When I watch Transformers movies, I don't pay much attention to their mythology. For example, even though I watched (and liked) Transformers, I had no idea who "the fallen" were supposed to be when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen came out last year. So Dark of the Moon could really mean something within the context of this mythology that I don't pay attention to.

However, to me it just sounds like an attempt to borrow the name recognition of a number of other successful properties. Not that the Transformers franchise should need that, but it seems that way all the same.

First and most obviously, there's Pink Floyd's seminal album Dark Side of the Moon. I didn't find any poster images that have been made public for the actual Transformers movie (which is due out next summer), but I did find several pieces of artwork made by fans and satirists to poke fun at the title's similarity to Pink Floyd's album. One of those is the one you see above.

But then there's also a seemingly intentional shout-out to another popular recent usage of the word "moon": Twilight: New Moon. (Or The Twilight Saga: New Moon, or however you're supposed to write it.) Should we expect to see robots who transform into vampires and werewolves in the new movie?

And finally, to bring us full circle in this discussion, the word "dark" gives us that Dark Knight feeling we all know and love. And The Dark Knight was the third highest grossing film of all time in the U.S., at $533 million.

Of course, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is 11th on that list. So Michael Bay's formidably craptastic series really doesn't need the help.

Improper terminology

The big news in geekdom this past weekend was that a release date was announced for Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie: July 20, 2012. Stay tuned to your local entertainment blog for the eventual reveal of the title.

I didn't take issue with the release of the news, but I did take issue with how it was reported.

Namely, in certain outlets, I saw the story reported with variations on the following headline:

'Dark Knight' Sequel Gets Official Release Date

I know the general public has a short memory span, but come on, this is ridiculous.

It's as though an excellent little movie by the name of Batman Begins never existed. (An excellent little movie that I happen to think is more excellent than The Dark Knight.)

Sure, The Dark Knight did capture the zeitgeist in a way few other films have, in a way that far outpaced Batman Begins. It was the second-highest grossing movie of all time in the U.S. until Avatar came along and pushed both it and Titanic down a notch. And Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker struck viewers in a way they hadn't been struck before -- the fact that he died only gave the performance extra weight.

But none of these reasons make it right to go switching up the terminology.

The only really meaningful definition of the word "sequel" is "the second movie in a series." That's a little narrow; a sequel can actually refer to any of the subsequent movies after the first. But each sequel is defined by its relationship to the first movie, not to any of the others. And if you say just "the sequel to such-and-such," without any other modifier, you're talking about the second movie, not the third or any other. It has to do with the definite article "the" vs. the indefinite article "a."

But you wouldn't say Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is either "a" sequel to Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, or "the" sequel to Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, now would you? No. Both of those movies are sequels to the original Friday the 13th, God help them.

It's the same with Batman 3. Which will not be called Batman 3, I'm sure, but will certainly struggle to find something as distinctive as The Dark Knight, while still reminding viewers it's a Batman movie.

And I don't really think it was just a semantic error, calling Batman 3 the sequel to The Dark Knight. A headline writer's only job is to be clear and succinct, and perhaps a little funny if the situation calls for it. (Or, if you're The New York Post, to string together as many rhyming single-syllable abbreviations for common words -- abbreviations that no one uses -- as possible, while still making some modicum of sense.) A headline writer knows exactly what is commonly denoted by the word "sequel" -- he or she just chooses to ignore it if pandering to his/her audience.

But is it actually pandering to call the next movie the sequel to The Dark Knight? You could argue it both ways. It's true that significantly more people saw The Dark Knight than Batman Begins, even if it would seem like a logical prerequisite to see the first film first. So maybe the headline is just trying to appeal to as many people as possible. Besides, perhaps calling it "Third Batman Movie" instead of "Dark Knight Sequel" would just make people think of a crappy movie by the name of Batman Forever, which was Joel Schumacher's first Batman movie, the third in the original reboot of Batman movies. "Dark Knight Sequel" drives home the idea that we're still on this particular series of reboots, and haven't somehow slipped back into the age of Schumacher's Batman, with his nippled breastplates and bulging codpieces.

Sometimes, stuff like this is just fun to talk about -- no more, no less.

Quantifying menace

In case you were wondering, my subject is the title for a script I'm writing, a time-twisting intergalactic thriller in which James Bond teams up with Jar Jar Binks to fight an evil coalition comprised of Goldfinger, Darth Maul and a bunch of corrupt imperial senators.

Okay, no.

Actually, it was inspired by re-watching The Dark Knight earlier today. I came away with the DVD from a holiday gift swap -- much better than the fake vomit or package of blue condoms you often get stuck with at these things. We finally got around to our second viewing today, and I have to say, I liked it better the second time around. I liked it plenty well the first time, just not as much as the average person. Something about it made me appreciate it more the second time.

But that's not what I'm here to write about today. Actually, I want to write about the funny explanation given by the MPAA for its PG-13 rating, which I happened to notice after the FBI warning screen.

Namely, it was rated PG-13 for "intense sequences of violence and some menace."

Some?

That seems like a funny way to measure the amount of menace in The Dark Knight, which I consider to be among the most menacing mainstream films ever made -- even including R-rated movies. That doesn't mean it's the most violent or psychologically scarring, but this movie has menace coming out its ears. You could say that Heath Ledger's Joker is the very personification of menace. Doesn't it seem like this would be more honest? "Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and a shitload of menace." Then that would have to be followed by "This rating justification is rated PG-13 for some profanity."

It made me think of something really funny the website I write for compiled a couple years back. And since this is Memorial Day, no day for me to come up with an original idea, I am going to possibly illegally reproduce the following list for your reading enjoyment. Hey, at least I'm not trying to pass it off as my own. However, maintaining my own blog anonymity (for whatever value that has) precludes me from crediting the actual authors. Or should I say, compilers.

While I contemplate the hot water I could theoretically be getting myself into, I hope you will enjoy the following:

The 10 Funniest Ratings Explanations by the Motion Picture Association of America:

10. Mother’s Boys (1994)
“Rated R for language and for a mother’s sociopathic behavior”

9. Indian in the Cupboard (1995)
“PG for mild language and brief video images of violence and sexy dancing”

8. All I Wanna Do (1998)
“PG-13 for teen sex-related material, language, and substance misuse”

7. The Hunted (1997)
“R for strong bloody ninja violence and a humorous drug related scene”

6. War of the Buttons (1994)
“PG for mischievous conflict, some mild language, and bare bottoms”

5. Alien vs. Predator (2004)
“PG-13 for violence, language, horror images, slime, and gore”

4. Skateboard Kid II (1995)
“PG for brief mild language and an adolescent punch in the nose”

3. Bushwhacked (1997)
“PG for language and a mild birds and bees discussion”

2. Twister (1996)
“PG-13 for intense depiction of very bad weather”

1. Jefferson in Paris (1995)
“PG-13 for mature theme, some images of violence, and a bawdy puppet show"

Thanks, guys. I'd credit you if I weren't strangely committed to masking my identity. Not unlike a certain caped crusader I know.