Mrebo said:
I agree, it's not that every or even most entertainment should be dirty, gritty, dark, etc, but that there is a tendency to avoid imperfection. Where is the break-down happening? Are modern tastes simply oriented to superficially perfect fluff?
Perhaps on a related matter, the NYT had an article about the decline of quotable lines from movies. I'm not sure this is true and meaningful or not.
Yeah exactly, it isn't darkness I am looking for it's the type of lived in detail that you see in the real world so you can relate to it. I mean you can get whole stories out of someone having trouble paying their bills, or for instance needing to find someone to watch their kid or something like that but these types of stories are completely passed up. You don't even have to focus on these details for stories just have them in the background of the set, or have them mentioned in passing and have your actors not be perfect pretty people and that will be enough for me. Right now I am completely draw out of modern Tv shows and movies and have real trouble getting caught up in them because I don't believe that the world or the people in it are real.
Again it isn't dark content, The Marry Taylor Moore show isn't dark to say the least but I still believe she is a real person and I can relate to her because her life isn't perfect and she doesn't seem to have magic money that never runs out. That is the level of real world detail I am looking for in my Tv shows and movies. They can still be light and fluffy without taking place in magic land.
Oh and yeah the ratings system is completely messed up, I few years before I was born The Shining was an R rated movie, now it feels PG except for the one nude scene. Patriot Games was rated R when I was a kid but now adays you will find more sexual content in an episode of The Big Bang theory and that airs in what used to be called the family hour with a TVPG rating, and as for violence well now adays the average TVPG rated episode of something like Castle or CSI is way more violent then that movie was.
The PG13 rating is a joke, as long as it's an action movie you can get away with dropping the FBomb, having sex scenes, and showing people getting their heads hacked off complete with blood gushing everywhere. This sort of thing was limited to R rated slasher films when I was kid, but now adays if it's an action movie that makes it fine for kids to watch. However if a drama like the King's Speech doesn't have any sex or violence and all it does is drop the FBomb a few times, that movie gets hit with an R rating because we can't have kids exposed to that. Unless it Judi Dench saying it right after James Bond has killed a bunch of people then it is fine.
Do I want censorship? Far from it I am just saying that the rating system is clearly broken and gamed to make sure all action movies are huge hits now regardless of content so I have lost all respect for the rating system and no longer pay attention to it. The last straw for me was in fact The King's Speech, I bought it on Bluray based on the good reviews but then because of family maters I waited two weeks to watch it because I wasn't about to watch an R Rated movie while keeping an Eye on my little brother and sister and then I put it in and saw that apart from two scenes where the FBomb appears it was the sort of drama film that would have been made in the 40s, and yet somehow it was given an R???? My little brother and sister know not to say that word, so I could have watched it any time in the passed two weeks if I had known. Then two years later I saw Skyfall in theaters and they were allowed to drop that same bomb and only got hit with a PG13, that was it for me and I have not paid attention to the ratings of films since then. The whole system is broken and stupid and I just preview films now and then decide if I can watch them with my little brother and sister up. It used to be that even though I didn't agree with some ratings the MPAA handed out I could at least use them as something of a guideline that would give me some idea of a movie's content before I saw it, those days are gone so I don't pay attention to the ratings any more.
Oh and since then I have watched The King's Speech at least half a dozen times with my little brother and sister up and they have never used the F word in their lives. Talk about a useless system.