As a new family film that has been described by critics as “a breath of fresh air” opened earlier this month in theaters across the U.S., some Christian film reviewers are calling attention to the Hollywood “ratings creep” that makes finding child-safe, family-friendly films increasingly difficult these days.
Benji Off the Leash! (rated PG) might be considered exceptional among this year's theatrical releases if only for the fact that it has dug out common ground among critics as varied as Hot Ticket's Leonard Maltin, the New York Times's David Kehr, Michael Medved of the Salem Radio Network, and Ted Baehr of The Movie Guide. These and a host of other critics find themselves in uncommon accord as they extol the virtues of the new Benji movie — producer-director Joe Camp's latest challenge to the Hollywood cynics who believe in lowering standards to raise profits.
In his Movie Guide review, Baehr describes the film as one featuring a Christian worldview and affirming positive moral values. He expects the “cute, adorable story” will entertain adults and children alike, and that parents will find its content especially gratifying, since Camp “wants to give us a real family movie without sex, violence, nudity, or profanity, and he does just that.”
Benji Off the Leash! is the story of young Colby, a boy whose father runs an illegal kennel. One of the dogs, who is pregnant, goes missing, and as the story begins Colby has found her and is secretly caring for her and her pups. But when the dad discovers that his prized breeder has mated with a mutt, he seizes her and the passably “purebred-looking” pups and forces Colby to leave the lone, obviously mixed-breed puppy to die.
However, the soft-hearted Colby returns to rescue the mutt, smuggling him into his fort, where the boy raises him in secret. And as Benji grows up, he begins to have adventures involving a host of delightful characters of both the human and animal variety: bumbling dog-catchers, a lonely eccentric, one clownish and klutzy stray mutt who becomes Benji's running buddy, and even the canine hero's own mother, whom he sets out to rescue from her brutish owner.
Fighting the Movie Industry's Moral Decline
As a Christian filmmaker, Joe Camp often finds himself at odds with an industry that sometimes seems indifferent, if not hostile, to the moral values he holds dear. He complains of how Hollywood, dominated by the major studios, progressively lowered the bar of decency, and in an effort to appease the family-values crowd, eventually formed the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to police its products.
“This gave them the right to say and do whatever in the world they wanted to,” Camp says. He explains how the MPAA ratings system, in effect, has allowed movie industry profiteers to generate increasingly objectionable material in the guise of art or entertainment, so long as they covered themselves “by warning parents that it was there. So the bar went lower… and lower.” The director of Benji Off the Leash! says his dream is to see that bar come back up.
Those who might accuse Camp of exaggerating would do well to check out the well-documented proof of the MPAA's sliding moral scale. A study released last month by the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) suggests the MPAA has grown increasingly lenient in its standards over the past ten years, with violence, sex, and profanity in movies increasing significantly from 1992 to 2003. The researchers term this phenomenon “ratings creep.”
What Harvard Learned and Christian Researchers Already Knew
Published in the July 13 issue of Medscape General Medicine, the study found that a decade of this ratings creep has made it harder and harder for today's concerned parents to be sure a film is free from the sort of graphic content they would not want their children to see. Kimberly Thompson, associate professor of risk analysis and decision science at HSPH and co-author of the study, says the MPAA ratings can furnish parents with some insight, but she warns that today's moms and dads need to be “calibrated” with the content of today's films.
Thompson directs the Kids Risk Project at HSPH and says it is her hope that the results of this Harvard study will help raise parents' and physicians' awareness of the role of media in children's lives. She agrees with the HSPH study's assertion that “Parents must recognize their responsibility in choosing appropriate films with and for their children, and in discussing the messages in films with children to mediate any potential adverse effects and reinforce any potential beneficial effects.”
WorldNetDaily reports that at least one Christian ministry, which works to warn parents and the public about the content of popular movies, was not at all surprised by the HSPH study's conclusion that films within the same rating classes are significantly raunchier than they once were. The Childcare Action Project (CAP) Ministry says its researchers made that discovery some four years ago.
Representatives of CAP say the Harvard research echoes its own findings from 2000. The group's statistical analysis across eight years yielded evidence that PG-13 movies had consistently included more and more objectionable content over time, leading the researchers to coin a new rating for certain films, “R-13.”
In the first five years of CAP's study, the percentage of R-13 movies more than quadrupled. In other words, the Christian researchers found that 450 percent more PG-13 audiences were exposed to R-rated programming in the year 2000 than were in 1996/97.
Tom Carder, president of CAP says it is too bad the Harvard School of Public Health did not consult the ministry's findings. “Much of their work would have already been done,” he says — work that is meticulously, scientifically conducted.
Carder points out that the research CAP does yields a tremendous amount of valuable data, and much of it is unique in the field of cultural analysis. This valuable information is shared through the free service the Christian ministry provides in the interests of children and the adults who care for them.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press).
