Airplane II gets away with blowjob innuendo and brief nudity with a PG rating. Brown Bunny isn’t rated, In the cut is pretty graphic but gets an R. Implied guys giving blowjobs probably wouldn’t make it through the committee for PG now, but give it time. If the movie is mild enough it could get through.
This was in reference to Jesus Christ Superstar.
JCS was incredibly controversial at the time, for reasons ranging from the use of rock music to tell the Gospel story, to implying a romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, to depicting Jesus as a mostly human figure with doubts and uncertainties (remember Mary’s line “He’s just a man”?), to portraying Judas too sympathetically. It was widely regarded as blasphemous by many religious groups.
True, there’s nothing violent or overtly sexual in the film, but I can see being surprised that such touchy topics wouldn’t have earned it a more restrictive rating.
Wasn’t that Airplane!, i.e. not its lesser sequel?
The lady who died standing up is what did it to me.
I don’t recall a movie rated R for religious controversy, do you have an example? Last Temptation got an R but it had plenty of nudity and violence.
Sorry, right, meant to correct that. I sort of had to run through the plots in my head to figure out which one it was.
Life of Brian has an R rating, according to IMDB. Wikipedia tells me that it was given an X certificate (in the UK sense, meaning 18 years or older) by several local authorities in various places in Britain.
And I wasn’t really arguing that JCS should have a higher rating, only that I can understand why someone would be surprised that it doesn’t.
It was rated in 1979 so I’m not surprised. Hard to say what it would get today. I recall the controversy in England, but it was to be expected. I guess JCS had a little controversy attached, and maybe my memory isn’t good enough, but I recall a lot of religious types saw it as a way to get down with kids and get them back in church. I didn’t have much exposure to middle America back then, it might have been a lot more controversial outside of the northeast metropolitan areas.
Granted, outside of the controversy *Life of Brian * still earns its R with a couple “fucks” and full-frontal male and female nudity.
How shall we fuck off, O Lord?
I always thought the PG/R rating was more befuddling than the G/PG split, in that if it was suitable for broadcast on television uncut (in that era), it was usually rated “G”, while PG usually meant that there was some cussing or brief nudity or gore that would be clipped out. In practice, this usually meant that only kiddie stuff and the like were rated “G”. So it makes sense that some of these were rated “G” even though they weren’t kid oriented.
I kind of wonder where the G/PG divide is today; even stuff like “Frozen” is rated PG nowadays, although I have no doubt it would have been G, had it come out in 1982.
I think parents think of the G rating these days as being for really little kids (stuff like the Barney movie, or the Sesame Street movies), so almost all “family” movies these days are given a PG whether they’ve earned them or not. I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything in Frozen that would earn stronger than a G, but it was still released PG, probably at Disney’s request.
I’m amazed by how much violence there was in the first season of The Adventures of Superman before the producers realized it was supposed to be a show for kids.
Here’s the original episode of Gunsmoke (famous for the introduction by John Wayne.) At 8:04 we see the very first interaction between Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty. She seems awfully anxious to go “fishing” with the marshall.
Here’s kindly sheriff Andy Taylor on a date, ordering a beer! (13:11)
And, amazingly, Leave It to Beaver once had an episode where Beaver enables an alcoholic.
A guy being executed by being nailed to a wooden cross isn’t violent …???
Granted, there weren’t jetting arcs of blood, but honestly, you don’t find anything disturbing in torturing a man to death?
Actually both films had them. The first was more obvious with Elaine ‘re-inflating’ the auto-pilot, but Airplane 2 had this!
One of the funniest scenes in the whole movie! (the look on Terry Jones’ face kills me!)
Life of Brian was outright banned in a southern US locality (South Carolina I think) primarily because of a senator’s old bag of a wife! There was a pretty big outcry of censorship and it eventually played.
JCS was originally conceived as a stage musical, but just the idea of it was so controversial that no one would back it financially so it could only be made as a rock opera recording (i.e. an album). Once the album became a huge success the plays in London & Broadway followed (as did the film).
The crucifixion is the ultimate special case. Literally billions of people literally wear it around their necks*!!*
Yeah, billions have desensitized themselves to what it actually represents. I find that sad. And disturbing.
The violent parts were not shown. He didn’t look too comfortable though.
Do I not recall correctly that in JS:Superstar he was tied to a scaffolding rather than being nailed to a cross?
You’re probably thinking of “Godspell.” Also “G” rated.
Essentially, PG started being associated with inoffensive family stuff, so any film worth its marketing salt would try to lobby for a PG-13. This trickled down to films that didn’t want a similarly unattractive reputation as “kid stuff” for G, so would lobby their films to be a PG, even though the reasons are pretty dubious: “mild action”, “brief peril”, “adult themes”, etc.