A great documentary opens today in theaters in limited release and "unrated". The documentary is “Bully”.
Movie critic Richard Corliss summarizes the film this way:
Lee Hirsch's documentary pries open a world of child abuse by other children: taunts and threats that can drive a victim to suicide. Bully is a documentary as vivid as any horror film, as heartbreaking as any Oscar-worthy drama. Alex Libby, a 12-year-old in Sioux City, Iowa, is a sweet, smart kid with a passing resemblance to a pre-teen David Letterman. His classmates call him Fish Face, and that’s when they’re being nice. On the school bus, the boy in the next seat tells him, “I will f—in’ end you, and stuff a broomstick up your ass.”
That last episode reminds me of my daughter’s school bus experience last year in 6th grade.
She was not bullied but observed surprisingly bad school bus behavior in children who were just 11. Someone recently called me “puritanical” because I don’t cuss much. Neither does my daughter. I consider myself liberal but I used to think that 11 year olds were still “kids”. The stories my daughter told me about kids behavior in the bus were quite shocking: Kids pushing and shoving kids who pleaded to be left alone, sixth graders cussing incessantly, calling other kids names, bigger kids intimidating smaller kids, and sixth graders watching porn on their smart phones. I called the bus company and they seemed surprised about my complaint. I guess I am too puritanical. Nothing changed. I organized a car pooling solution and was happy to spare my daughter the bus experience. Now I am going to call them again and ask them to watch the movie.
The Motion Picture Association of America slapped Bully with an R rating because of the use of the F word. Such a rating (viewers must be 17+ without parents) will keep kids—who should be first in line to see the film—from seeing it. Katy Butler, an Ann Arbor, Mich., teen who started an online petitionon behalf of a milder, PG-13 rating for the film has attracted more than a half-million signatures. On appeal, most of the MPAA board members agreed to overturn the original rating, but the motion failed because it fell one vote short of the two-thirds threshold.
As “BusinessWeek” reports, Stephen Bruno from “The Weinstein Company” counters that the appeal wasn’t unprecedented.
“We did not think we’d lose,” Bruno says, noting that the MPAA in 2005 overturned an R rating to a PG13 rating for the Iraq War documentary Gunner Palace, which had 43 instances of the F-word. “The reasoning was that it was during the Iraq war and people needed to see it in its original version,” says Bruno. “Our argument is that the bullying that’s going on in school is also somewhat of a war, but a war in schools, and it also needs to be seen in its original version.”
I agree that middle school age children should see this movie, but so should the parents. There are too many parents with a very lax parenting approach who don’t have time to supervise their children’s activities or don’t see anything wrong with allowing them the freedom to express themselves with obscene or offensive language, to watch violent or inappropriate material on their electronic devices, to mistreat others because of their look, sexual orientation or what not. Perhaps the R rating will force them to take their kids to see the movie, but perhaps not.
Therefore, the best alternative is to have the kids see it.
To put some pressure on the MPAA to lower the rating to PG-13 you can go to their web site and either call or email them!