Fercryinoutloud!

The film version of hip 80's musical Rent is apparently being released with a PG-13 rating, despite a smattering of four letter words, sexual themes and drug use. Chud uses the opportunity to praise the MPAA for a rare smart ratings decision, but even the article's description of how it recieved the rating shows just how patently absurd the whole ratings process is:

The film originally got an R rating, and Chris Columbus claims that Sony assured him that they didn’t want him to cut anything to get a PG-13. “The MPAA gave me a list of things to cut,” he said at a press conference Saturday. “They gave me five to seven language issues, and they gave me a list of 30 picture edits they wanted me to change.”

In the end Columbus made the language changes and cut 5 frames of a needle going into an arm – “We did lose a third of a second. It was the difference between the needle going into the arm and the needle going into the arm. A second is 24 frames and we cut 5.” – but otherwise he left the picture edits alone. When he resubmitted the film he got the PG-13.

So the difference between an R and a PG-13 is literally 5 frames of film? Could the assignment of a rating, which often makes a pivotal difference in the film's marketing and box-office, be any more arbitrary? Ratings and content regulation, even supposedly "self-imposed" (really just code for the-government-will-if-we-won't) are a bad enough idea even if carried out in a sane, organized fashion; but this is the MPAA, and sanity is the least of their objectives.