It’s a mistake for me to go to the Fox News website. It’s easy to get angry over their conservative coverage of public policy, world affairs and social issues. It’s just a given I'm going to get mad about something they say and I assume most people know what they can expect from their coverage. What gets me scratching my head are issues where something is dropped into a story that seems placed to generate controversy.

As an example, in the remake of Total Recall, like in the original, there is a three breasted woman. I could go on a whole tangent about how out of place she is in this film considering the locale, but I’ll leave that for another time. Fox News has a short article about the character, wondering why she would appear in a PG-13 film. I have to admit I forgot the original was rated R. According to the article, just like the original the character will give the audience a flash of her three breasts. When I saw the trailer for the remake just before Comic-Con there was a suggestion that she shows some skin.

The article then wrote something that made me stop reading for a moment. The article said “the character will appear completely nude from the waist up, which is fairly rare in a movie marketed to tweens.” Tweens? I wondered how in the world this movie would be considered a tween movie. I was pretty sure this was another Fox News distortion of the facts but after spending some time thinking about it, I would have to stay they stretched the marketing a bit about this movie but they are essentially correct in speaking about inadvertent marketing for tweens because of the history of the PG-13 rating.

For the longest time you had PG and R rated films. You knew what you got with a PG film and you knew what you were getting with an R. The best 70s analogy of this would be Jaws and Star Wars were PG films; you had some scary moments, some drama, but there was no doubt parents and adults could watch a PG film. The movies Hardcore and Serpico were definite R rated films of the era. Kids weren’t interested in them because of truly mature subject matter. You would have the sex comedies, the coming of age films which I would consider soft R films. A few I can remember from the early 80s would be No Small Affair with a young Demi Moore and My Tutor. They could have easily been PG films if you cleaned up a little bit of language and used suggested nudity instead of real nudity in some scenes.

When Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out (and I'm sure many of you know about the heart ripping scene) parents were so upset that PG-13 was born. It was supposed to separate family friendly PG movies from older skewed PG-13 films. The MPAA rating is supposed to be a guide for parents to figure out what is best for their child in movie viewing, but it has evolved into something like a stamp of approval for movies. Even with an expanded rating system, which describes a bit of why the rating is placed on films, there are a good many people that will think of an R movie as not appropriate for a kid but won't make a distinction between a PG or PG-13 film. The studios and the system don't get off the hook because they constantly try to push for a PG-13 rating because PG has replaced G in the minds of many as being a kids rating. Children and adults will see a PG-13 film. The result is you have a sliver of films that are G, a sizable films that are R and a vast majority of movies shooting for the PG-13 sweet spot.

What happens is you get movies that would have gone for an R in the 80s getting a PG-13 rating for almost the same content today. The first three Die Hard films were rated R, mostly because of violence. As the series went on, the violence became more exaggerated, especially in the third film. When the fourth film in the series was released, it was rated PG-13. Cut out some swear words and a film gets a desirable PG-13 rating? Americans have a taboo for sex, a taboo for language but has no problem with violence. Actually, the sex taboo, in certain conditions, is lax. I've found it disturbing that two hit TV shows from last season, 2 Broke Girls on CBS and Whitney on NBC, have candid discussions about tampons, menstrual cycles and other formerly taboo topics during the early hours of prime time. A show like How I Met Your Mother tries to find ways that a lead character can have sex with as many women as possible. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but if I had a show on television I would try to be mindful of what children might be exposed to.

It is a fact that if you go outside of the United States you will find a lot more risqué antics on television and films that don't seem to affect children. It could also be easily argued that parents should be more vigilant in monitoring what their kids watch. This, however, can be difficult to do. Anyone who watched the trailer for the three recent Batman movies knows those films are a cut above a standard comic book style movie. The violence in Avengers is going to be fanciful while Batman it will be deadly. When I saw The Dark Knight Rises a few weeks ago there were a lot of parents who brought their kids to the film; kids who were in the tween range of 8-12. As I saw in a recent article in the LA Times, the Batman comic has been around for so long and has been through so many transformations you can go into a toy shop and see items advertising the film to kids and no one bats an eye about it. Just a few moments ago I saw a commercial on TV for the new Bourne film and missiles were shot, explosions were set off, fires were set, people left from building to building and lots of mayhem was seen. If you put a cape on the lead it could have been a superhero movie. The movie is rated PG-13.

As much as I want to find fault with the Fox News report I think there may be some truth to their assertion. Just one more thing to really stir things up. I went to a Carl's Jr near my apartment and along with the Pirate movie toys and the special Spider-Man cardiac inducing sandwich their large size cups have a picture of Sylvester Stallone and there are posters up advertising the R rated film The Expendables 2. How better to get youth to want to see a R rated movie than to have ads for it in a fast food restaurant.