MPAA Rating

Husband and I were settling in to watch a video the other night - Mission Impossible III, which I wanted to see for its own sake long before Tom Cruise opened his mouth and proved to the world what a moron he is - when the MPAA rating screen came up:

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of frenetic violence and menace,
disturbing images and some sensuality.

I'm not sure which stopped me first - the "frenetic violence" or the "menace." Husband actually stopped the DVD so we could make sure we were really reading the rating correctly - neither of us ever remembered having seen a movie described in quite that way.

What prompted me to write about this is that, five minutes ago, MeadMaker called me. We had talked about getting together to watch football on Sunday, and he was calling to confirm the plans.

"While I have you on the phone," he said, "do you know what 'frenetic' means?"

"Yeah," I said, "it means crazy-busy, lots-going-on-at-once kind of movement. Think 'ADD'."

"Yeah," he said, "I know what it means now - I had to look it up. I'm only asking because we were watching a movie the other day, and it came up as part of the little warning thingy they have about the rating."

We figured out in short order that we'd watched the same film, and that the rating description had stopped him short, too, but for different reasons. He wasn't sure he'd ever encountered the word "frenetic" before and figured that if he, being reasonably educated and well-read, didn't know what the word meant, he's betting that the better part of the American viewership of films wouldn't know it, either.

"Yeah, probably," I said, "but how many people do you think actually READ those things, anyway?