It is odd to me that with everything going on in the world people find it necessary to complain about this. This is just further proof that people cannot be bothered to be parents any longer, they must rely on the rest of the world to do the parenting for them. This complaint is just as bad as all the folks trying to ban smoking from movies, claiming that Hollywood uses its movies to recruit kids to smoke. Yeah, that’s what they think, and they even wanted me to help them.
Only five days ago I was tempted to write this rant when I received an email from Jonathan Polansky, a Consultant to the University of California-San Francisco (medical school) Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. His little group, called Smoke Free Movies, has set out to “sharply reduce the U.S. film industry’s usefulness to Big Tobacco’s domestic and global marketing — a leading cause of disability and premature death.” Basically, their attempts are to point the finger at someone else and blame them for the problem, once again a group is trying to get society, and in this case movies, to do the parenting for our parents.
The reason Polansky contacted me is due to the fact that even after the MPAA agreed to smoking to affect movie ratings, his org is getting the cold shoulder. So, he thought I would do the dirty work for him. Here’s how it read in an email he sent me:
Because of our advocacy for smoke free movies, the MPAA is unresponsive to our requests. Would you consider passing on copies of the ratings bulletins MPAA issues on a regular basis to the trade press? We are especially interested in the bulletins issued between May 10 and September 10 of this year. We have selected items from these bulletins, supplied by the MPAA to the Vermont attorney general’s office, but not the complete lists. We would appreciate your assistance, which we will be happy to keep confidential. Thanks very much for considering this request. If you have any questions, please give me a call…
Unresponsive? Come on Jon, they are allowing smoking to affect ratings! If that isn’t ridiculous then what is? As pointed out here, traffic deaths amount to 1.2 million deaths every year, why is no one out there banning car chases from movies? Why isn’t anyone banning poor eating habits? 12 percent of all the world’s deaths come from heart disease, shouldn’t this mean that Pulp Fiction should be NC-17 at least for having not only anal rape and violence, but smoking, car crashes and a glorified Samuel L. Jackson chomping down on a Big Kahuna Burger? Oh the injustice!
Suffice to say I didn’t return Jon’s email or call him. I am not sure what I think about the fact that he felt I might just up and send him information that wouldn’t be supplied to him directly. Any time you have to ask someone for something and in the asking say, “which we will be happy to keep confidential,” you may as well not even ask.
Seriously people, stop with the complaining and start with the parenting. The world can’t do it for you, and if you think they should we have supplied you with an option. LEAVE YOUR KIDS AT HOME! Yup, don’t take them anywhere, unplug the TV, turn off the phone and start up the butter churn. It’s the Wild West again, but don’t go to the saloon because thar be fornicating there.
