I read an article today on /Film regarding an NC-17 Rating being handed down for a couple of big-ticket movies due to be released soon...and it made me wonder, how useful are movie ratings in modern society??

The only answer I could come up with is, quite frankly, they aren't.

In all honesty, Rating systems are all but obsolete in this day and age really. And their obsolescence is due to more than one major factor. On one hand there's the fact that society is much more open-minded and much less innocent than in the past, and on the other...well...Thanks to the Internet, anyone who wants to can just download whatever movie they want, regardless of rating. So really, at the end of the day, the only group movie rating systems benefit anymore are parents. So bearing that in mind, I think we're left with two options:

1. Overhaul the ratings system to better suit the one demographic it still serves a useful purpose for.

2. Squash the whole thing entirely, and let people just use plain common sense (i.e. Don't let your kid watch movies you deem inappropriate).

Personally, I think option one is much more feasible in so much as no one seems to like using common sense; and on top of THAT particular brand of laziness, there's the notion that no one likes accepting responsibility for their actions either. After all, it's much easier to pass the buck by creating some kind of organization or pseudo-governmental group and telling them to take care of the problem for you. That way when your kid sneaks in to an R Rated movie, you can just blame them and be instantly absolved of the mistake you made in not watching over your children.

Likewise on that same train of thought, there's the concept known as "ratings creep"...where the MPAA's Ratings Board have been accused of, for myriad reasons, monkeying with how movies are classified for given ratings. While I personally am undecided as to whether or not this phenomenon exists, I certainly wouldn't rule it out. However I also wouldn't rule out the notion that it's once again just the general populace of "concerned citizens" passing the buck because they can't be arsed to deal with petty things like accountability and responsibility.

Any way you slice it, at the end of the day the whole system is a gigantic, obsolete mess and is at the point now where in my opinion, it's just wasting a lot of people's time and money and should either be overhauled or scrapped entirely.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.