A popular blog meme is the Mingle blog rating (e.g. Bainbridge, Opinio Juris). You won’t see it here: movie ratings are trademarked by the Motion Picture Association of America, and they come down like a hammer on those who use the trademarks, and this blog-meme not only uses the letter rating, but the actual MPAA symbol. Unfortunately, US trademark law forces the MPAA to take a heavy-handed approach, because of the alternative: forty years ago, they did not seek trademark protection for their new “X” rating and as a result, the rating became a generic symbol for hard-core pornography (and infantilized the commercial moviegoing public: because now most theaters and brick-and-mortar video stores refuse to offer anything rated harder than “R”, we no longer get such movies, unlike the early 1970s when major studios would make X-rated movies with stars like Marlon Brando or Dustin Hoffman).
(And how well does the blog meme work? Well, the gizmo shares the MPAA’s left-leaning sensibilities: we got bumped to a “PG” because of multiple uses of the word “gun.”)
3 Comments
For two uses of the word ‘death’ and one of the word ‘drug’, my blog gets a PG. A couple of weeks ago, it found three instances of ‘death’ and produced an R rating.
Pretty low threshold, I’d say.
LMAO, I have a NC-17 rating for 49 uses of the word “cocaine” (when talking about people’s criminal charges and criminal history), along with 22 uses of the word “drugs” (ditto), and 21 uses of the word “murder” (ditto).
I got a G, in spite of dead (3x) and death (2x). I was sure there would be something in there about drugs, since I’ve discussed both medical marijuana, and the joys of Percocet (got my wisdom teeth out a few months ago).