Photos
It’s being reported today that director McG has lost his ultimately-right-but-seriously-misguided-in-his-execution ratings battle with the studio for an R rating for Terminator: Salvation. The story itself broke on AICN (via Vulture), which discovered an official MPAA rating for the movie on Pizza Hut’s tie-in website. Perfect. Harry Knowles suggested that the PG13 rating was not as threatening to the film’s integrity as you might think in a way that only Harry Knowles could:
If the MPAA decided this film was so entrenched in an unbelievable universe then they might have given the film a hard PG 13. Especially if you look at the sort of things they’re allowing in R films these days… and by that, I mean an intense amount of cock. They could’ve looked at this film and said… HMPH NO COCK, PG13.
An Intense Amount of Cock is the name of all of Harry Knowles’s albums. They’re just numbered. You’re going to love the lead single off An Intense Amount of Cock IV. It’s called “HMPH NO COCK” and it’s intense. It’s our generation’s “Tubthumping.”
But I disagree with Harry Knowles (always). The PG13 rating is no good, and not something to pretend is actually a cool decision on the part of Hollywood. Although McG’s original argument for an R rating seemed to hinge on whether or not the studio agreed that gratuitous shots of a young woman’s tits was vital to the integrity of this beloved franchise, because McG is 14, the truth is that the Apocalypse does have an R vibe to it. Admittedly, the Apocalypse also has a NO PIZZA HUT TIE-INS vibe to it, so there are a few ways in which this has already slipped the rails. But here are 4 reasons why the Terminator Apocalypse is not appropriate for 13-year-olds:
Roving Gangs of Cannibals
After the Apocalypse, be it nuclear or Robo-, resources are going to become extremely scarce. Not only will supplies be wiped out, but without any reliable transportation to deliver replacements, things are going to get pretty bleak. Even the black market will eventually run thin, at which point the only thing left to barter will be humanity itself. That’s when the warring tribes of cannibals take over. I’m not saying they’re wrong. We’ve all got to eat. “You don’t know until you’re faced with the choice,” etc, etc. I’m just saying, bearing witness to this inevitability should at least require a parent or guardian. Raise your kids, jerks.
Roving Gangs of Cannibal Rapists
See above, and add the high frequency of pre-meal rape in a Post-Apocalyptic wasteland.
Swearing
As far as I’m concerned, words are just words, and they should be de-mystified lest they take on more power than they deserve. It’s just like Harry Potter being the only one brave enough to say Voldemort’s name aloud. It’s just like that. (No nerdo.) As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason that children shouldn’t be exposed to cursing and taught the values society places on particular expressions and epithets so that they understand it and can manage it well. But that’s swearing now, in our unApocalypsed world of iPhones and Celebreality. When it all turns to irradiated dust, the shit that’s going to come out of people’s mouths is going to be fucking terrifying. I’m 56 years old, and I will still be putting up my earmuffs.
Complete Reshifting Of The Entire Framework Of Mortality
Coming to terms with the fact that everyone dies, and that you yourself will die, is something that most people have and should experience by the time they are 13. Whether it’s suffering the death of an aging relative or a beloved pet in one’s youth, or just an abstract understanding culled from books and movies, at some point, by the time people reach adolescence, they understand the stakes. But Apocalypse is something else. Apocalypse is mass, inescapable, nightmare death. Apocalypse is not the slow release of one’s grip on life, or the inevitability of time. It’s instantaneous, blinding flash holocaust. It is the annihilation not just of self, but of every structure on which your idea of self and “the world” is built. It’s impossible to fully grasp, and it’s theoretical existence alone is abject horror. Eat your pizza.
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LOLZ! * Gabe, please gaymarry me!
Once again, you people are going to have to back off.
Let’s take that trip to Paris early, Gabe.
While I certainly appreciate your arguments which I did not read, the photograph at the top of this article make a pretty convincing argument that it is.
“HMPH No Cock” is your myspace profile song. (Myspace reference – take that Eminem!)
“(No nerdo.)”
I’m pretty sure you just won. At life. Forever.
Well said about swearing. My mom’s a novelist and she gets SO MUCH HATE-MAIL from people who are offended by her “non-Christian” (they always throw that in) use of dirty language. Her response has usually been, “When a guy is, say, running into a burning building to save his child, he’s not thinking, ‘Holy fudge! It’s hot as GUMDROPS in here!’”
Seriously. People need to get over their fear of fuck.
That picture wins.
This reminds me of when I saw Watchmen and a kid who looked about 13 came in with his parents. My friends and I laughed doubly hard at the awkward sex scene.
Someone I know took her two boys (ages, I believe 6 and 8 AT MOST.) to see Watchmen because she has never seen an internet ever and had no idea that it was not a child-friendly movie. But really, it was an understandable mistake, because so many R movies are child-friendly.
(She deserves to have to get up every night for the next year because of nightmares, but the poor kids.)
The big (haha) story here is that Harry Knowles gets all of his news from the Pizza Hut website.
Doy.
Can we preemptively declare Harry Knowles as 1-10 on your list of The Worst People of 2009 (There’s a fat joke somewhere here. Like, Harry Knowles weighs about as much as 10 people. That fat joke.)? Between calling for the firing of Roger Friedman last week, because he “illegally” watched an unreleased film and reviewed it (Ain’t It LEGAL News, apparently), and his repeated abortions of writing (abortion-horny?) and film criticism, he is the worst people of 2009 (so far).
i used to work at the pictured water park when i was in high school. it was called magic waters. and yes, there were lots of 13 year olds, and yes, i wanted them all to die.
I love that Gabe is a different age every time he mentions it.
He can’t keep his lies straight.
And that’s why 82 yr old men should not be allowed on the internet.
There is some serious Benjamin Button shit going on.
OMG UR 56??
Pizza hut has been grinding human meat into their pepperoni so that the kids will have a taste for human when techno remix’s Christian Bale’s freakout inevitable destroy the world.
I have nothing clever to say, because Gabe crafted a perfect post.
Pizza Hut, hard PG-13s, cock, the Apocalypse. These are a few of my favourite things.
I never really understand this argument. I would always prefer to see an R rated film because I presume the work has not been compromised to make it palatable to the mothers of seventh graders. And I would like to see Moon Bloodgood’s boobs. And I am okay with that.