“Hey Ma, Alex went to see the Avengers, can we go too?”
Cringe. While the idea of sitting and watching Paul Bettany for two hours sounds great to me, I have no idea if the movie is appropriate for my little guy to watch. I mean, I know it’s rated PG-13, but all the ‘other’ kids are watching it. Is there swearing? Sex? Violence?
Remember that awkward moment when you were watching a movie with your family and all of the sudden somebody on the screen was buck naked doing the horizontal mambo? Your Mom blushed and your Dad awkwardly jumped up and turned off the VCR, went and grabbed a drink, never to talk about it again.
I remembered when Erica talked about the amount of violence in the Hunger Games and wondered just how you know if a film is OK for a certain age? When it comes to watching sex and violence, do you trust your instinct and keep your kids home? Do you trust that if your childs best friends are being allowed to go that it’s an Ok film?
Enter Kids-in-mind.com, which provides complete information about the content of new releases and older movies, so parents can decide whether they should watch a movie with or without the kids.
In their words “It's like a food labeling system which tells you what a food item contains. That's it. We make no judgments about what is good or bad or anything else. Indeed, we do not "condemn," "critique" or "criticize" movies. And we don't "praise" or "recommend" movies either. We advance no "beliefs" and we do not "preach" anything. We are not affiliated with any political party, any cultural or religious group, or any ideology. The only thing we advocate is responsible, engaged parenting.”
And that about sums it up. They provide a summary of the amount of sex, volence, profanity in a film, but also a complete content analysis concerning the levels of violence, sex etc. with descriptions such as this one for the Avengers:
“Two guards are struck by arrows and fall dead; one falls off a roof and onto the ground below. A man shoots another man (we see the man pull the bullet out of his clothing later and there appears to be a bit of blood, but he seems OK). A woman is shown lying dead on the floor with a burn mark on her face.”
Great right?
You can use the site to search for a specific title, ‘New This Week’ or ‘New on Video’ to help narrow down your search. This info is so incredibly helpful on those movie nights when you’re standing in line at the movie store and can't tell if that PG-13 movie is really any better than the one that's rated R.
The database at Kids-in-mind.com goes back to the 90’s (although the 90’s reviews are not as detailed as the more recent films) I was able to find reviews for one of my favourite movies ever, Billy Madison, as well as make an informed decision on the Avengers (which we decided to skip in the theatre and watch when we can rent and fast forward.)
This is a site I will be bookmarking and passing on to my mom network for sure!
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