Posted on 11/11/2013 2:46:13 PM PST by Albion Wilde
Original title (Brits love overlong titles):
'Worrisome trend' as gun violence TRIPLES in box office hits since the 80s, making once R-rated films like Terminator and Die Hard look like child's play
• New study says top-grossing films once rated R at the time of their release would be rated PG-13 today
• Violence in movies has nearly quadrupled since the 50s
• 945 top box office hits released from 1950 to 2012 were studied
• Movies containing sex much more likely to earn an R-rating than those with violence
• Psychologists say watching violence on screen increases aggression in real life
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
And yet the actual violent crime rate keeps going down. So maybe people should stop whining, because the supposed harm is just plain not materializing.
That's not true. Family movies (4 tickets) make WAY more money than the "edgy, trendy" movies (2 tickets) that Hollywood prefers.
I’m constantly amazed at the gory violence shown on tv, think Walking Dead (which I kind of liked in the beginning) but heaven forbid they might show a boobie or two. Makes me laugh, watch Dawn of the Dead (the new version) in the first 10 minutes there is massive blood and gore, but one sceen has a toplees zombie shown and they pixelate out her breasts. Just dumb, we can see horrible things in full color blood, but NO boobies! Wouldn’t want to offend someone.
“Just dumb, we can see horrible things in full color blood, but NO boobies! Wouldn’t want to offend someone.”
Funny, though, if it’s one of those Travel Channel documentaries about some tribe in New Guinea or Africa, it’s perfectly OK to show boobies. Same with reruns of Shaka Zulu, for example. I guess if they meet a certain color standard, then they’re OK. Go figure.
Most of the family-friendly movies that make good box these days are CGI animated ones (e.g. anything by Pixar, films like “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”, “Despicable Me” etc.). Live action ones are often direct to DVD.
<< You may be too young to notice the difference >>
I’m 66 and have no faith in what “psychologist” say. They are little more than self-anointed witch doctors making up “illnesses” that are little more than behavior they don’t agree with.
That’s not a good argument. A ‘Fast and the Furious’ film grosses more than the local symphony makes in the same period of time too. Not everything is for kids.
There is a distinction to be made between clinical psychologists, who try to act like Freud and counsel people by often self-developed methods, as compared with research psychologists, who are qualified in statistics and who, as in this study, look at the numbers and see a trend. Will the trend have a given outcome? We don't know; and the researchers don't say; the news article says "worrisome." I would agree with that qualifier.
I'm about your age and have been worried for a long time, especially in the patterns of violence we see in the recent trends of militarized police actions over victimless crimes, of horrible stranger attacks for no reason, attacks and rapes by youths against the very elderly or frail, and the crudeness of bystanders who film attacks such as beat-downs, rapes or vehicle crashes to put it on the web, instead of rendering aid. There are new spikes in these phenomena.
Unforgiven: We all have it coming
Wow, you seem like a real movie connoisseur! Nice to meet another one on FR! I'm a little more into literary and dramatic themes and intelligent comedies than action flicks, tho.
The casualty rate in Vietnam was twenty times the casualty rate in Iraq/Afghanistan. Medical advances are a large part of that outcome. I see no reason why the same medical advances haven't been skewing the urban Saturday night kill rate downward as well. It's not too unusual to see urban kids in wheelchairs from neighborhood fire fights that some ER doc helped them to survive. There are also attempted gang shootings within ERs these days. The types of violence, the brazenness, and the "nothing is sacred" nature of the violence is a great concern to me.
What troubles me the most, aside from the sexual coarseness that has contributed to the destruction of family life, is the perversity of the kinds of gore we are now seeing in real life. One almost never heard of the kinds of ghoulish dismemberments and pornographic edge to the violence, especially violent rapes and ritual murders, that we have been hearing about in the past decade. I do think media may have be driving a lot of that.
I didn’t say death, I said violent crime rate. The whole picture is down, has been steadily dropping.
The internet has been driving a lot of what we hear about. There’s no longer any such thing as local news, it’s all national and even international. It used to be a lot of stuff hit local news and that was it, now local news puts it on their website and it gets “shared” all over the world. Which makes it seem like more of these things are happening, but they aren’t.
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