For the past many years I have been working on a usable and reliable rating system to use instead of the MPAA which doesn't work the way we want it to. I will explain all three parts of my rating, the two morality vectors, and the content gauge, and the maturity level. If you want more explaination, click on 'find out more.'

• +5 Teaches many many things, that are essential, rarely taught, and would elevate mankind to a higher plane. Don’t expect to ever see any of these films.
• +4 Teaches variety of and quality morals. Film this moral is rare.
• +3 Not as wide a variety, or less stressed than 4, yet retains a strong message which is generally outstanding. High class morals.
• +2 Bulk of movies. Think low class Disney films.
• +1 Token morals, almost an afterthought
• +0 Only exists on paper, not in real film. Well…Maybe a Burger King training video would have nonexistent morality.

• -0 Same as above
• -1 Things aren’t quite right, there is token immorality thrown in, almost as an after thought.
• -2 Glorify that which is bad, Demonize good things, This is a lot more common. Watch out, be sure to notice when this is happening.
• -3 Sex, Violence, Drugs, Language, all glorified. These movies defiantly are being made, they are more rare than 1 or 2, not usually popular by the common people, but you can find them without much trouble.
• -4 Super bad things taught, If the whole world followed these things, we’d be living in a very evil world. If a –4 movie has been made, it’d be really rare.
• -5 As bad as possible, If a +5 is teaching about Jesus, and becoming better, this would be the opposite, I highly doubt a –5 movie has ever been created.

• Defcon1- very light (from Dora the Explorer to Mary Poppins)
• Defcon2- light (Lion King to Secondhand Lions)
• Defcon3- Moderate (Unbreakable)
• Defcon4- Heavy (Sixth Sense to Lord of the Rings)
• Defcon5- Disturbing (Fight Club)
• Defcon6- Very Disturbing

The MPAA is broken, the rating system most of America uses. It doesn’t work how we want it to work. The reason we use it, and the purpose in creating it are two different things. The MPAA isn’t a scale of morality, which is what we need- the answer? We make our own.

I’ve been working of this for a long time. Is almost impossibly hard. I’ve recently dubbed this the JMPA or MPAJ, I haven’t decided which is better (‘J’ for Jerman…I know, How vain of me…)

Lets start. Does each film start bad (F, 0%) and earns points (raising the grade)? Does it start good (A+) and accumulates wicked points? Does it start neutral, a C (75%) on the grade scale, or a 50%(F) on the point scale? Is a number system good (1 dimensional)? Is 2 dimensions better, or 7? What kind of rubric do you use, or is using a rubric even possible? After bouncing around a few ideas, I’ve decided to use this system. Each film starts at zero, and earns points in both directions (moral, and immoral) at the same time The two vectors don’t cancel each other out. The highest and lowest is a 5, something you will rarely or never see. It’d probably be bell-curve-ish. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a +5 film. +4 would be Chronicles of Narnia. Lord of the Rings- possibly, M. Night Shyamalan- probably.

It gets more difficult when looking at the rubric you are forced to use, intentionally or otherwise. You have to use some sort of criteria to say how many steps forward, and backward. Example: Girl wears immodest skirt (please forgive me for using such a lame example, its just for illustration). However the filmmakers are using the Girl to explain how immodesty is bad. Do I still give points in both directions? Don’t worry about content because only morals matter? I don’t have an answer yet. For right now- content does have a place, maybe small, but it does have influence on the whole rating.

We love generalities so much, so here is a general rule. If it is glorified, it is encouraged (fighting and kung-fu in Matrix), if it is demonized it is discouraged (Killing people- just about every movie). If a liked character does something, that action is encouraged (James Bond drinks Martinis ,drives nice cars, and has sex), if a disliked character does something it is discouraged (cutting down trees is bad, because Saruman did it).

At this point in time, I and I alone, have the power of discretion to say what things are good and what is bad. I’m working on a way to make it more objective and less based on me, but this is the way it is now, until it gets fixed. Still- its better than the MPAA, which really is broken. To everyone who has read through this (which looking at the numbers of people visiting my blogger blog, is a heck of a lot of people) I would encourage you to decide on making your own rating system. Your own XMPA replacing X with your nickname. Tailor it how you want it, set it up as perfect as you can.

A rating for content, I've decided to go with the defcon system. I don't know how many defcon levels there are in the military (5??) but I'm tentatively going with 6 levels right now. This will show how much questionable content there is in a film (with no regard to the morals). Main areas are sexuality (immodesty, innuendos, jokes, general sexuality), language, violence (slapstick, humanized violence), and gore (throwing up, bloody knees, general gross stuff you don't want to see). One of these things can either be referenced to happening, shown or heard happening, or emphasized (good close up) as its happening. Depending on how much there is of everything the defcon will rise and I'll give a little blurb about why. Kinda like the current MPAA. In the military, Defcon5 is peace, and Defcon1 is full-out war, which we have never experienced. Defcon stands for Defense Condition which still applies to watching movies, but this is not the military, this is the MPAJ, so I can pretty much do whatever I want.

• Defcon1- very light (from Dora the Explorer to Mary Poppins)
• Defcon2- light (Lion King to Secondhand Lions)
• Defcon3- Moderate (Unbreakable)
• Defcon4- Heavy (Sixth Sense to Lord of the Rings)
• Defcon5- Disturbing (Fight Club)
• Defcon6- Very Disturbing

I don't really make it a point to watch 5s and 6s, so I don't have many examples of them. Here is an example for ya'll: Lion King gets Defcon2 for scary hyenas, a bad guy that kills (and is shown), very strong emotions of hate shown. Really- this is the type of thing that calls for committee action which I will try for, but I'll try my best when I have to do it alone.

During the fall semseter of 2005 I was reading in a local paper and there was a lot of discussion about movie ratings. I drafted a letter to the editor, and never sent it. This letter developed and is duplicated here:

The last few weeks I’ve been reading about how films are good and bad morally. People wrote in that the MPAA does this or that, or perhaps the content does it, or perhaps the message does: the lesson is what’s important. There was one guy who wrote a good letter about how the content and message are both equally important, you can’t single out the content only- which is what many LDS people like to focus on.

We believe that the Book of Mormon is a perfect book, maybe even the most perfect book on the world, however, at the same time its about murder, rape, adultery, secret combinations, bloody wars, betrayals, hate, pride, greed, etc. We’re told to read this book everyday, to study it. Now it also contains positive content, but it has huge portions of it that are predominately negative. Try to focus on Alma 47, or similar chapters, maybe Moroni 9 for a few days in a row, haven’t studied those chapters real in depth? I guess not. The Book of Mormon has a lot of good content (remember we aren’t talking about lessons and messages, those come later), but it doesn’t have perfectly white spotless content, its really very bloody. What I’ve just wrote is irrelevant, I know. The Book of Mormon is valuable to us because of its message.

Content and Message aren’t two brothers that influence you together. Content supports the message- always- and then the message influences you, or at least that’s how it should be. In the Book of Mormon there are heroes and there are villains and there is no gray. In real life or better yet, in film, the protagonist can mess up, make a mistake, maybe steal something or tell a lie- this creates ‘bad’ content, but if that content is used to teach a good value (such as his life gets messed up as a consequence, and the message is that stealing is bad) then the ‘bad’ content is irrelevant, it was as a means to teach. In the Book of Mormon, Nephi and Alma and Moroni are already perfect, they don’t mess up, they aren’t human, the only bad example we get is from the bad guys themselves.

In film the good guy usually does what’s good. Which is why it is so frustrating when the hero saves the day, is a wonderful role model, and then sleeps with the female lead (not his wife). This not only is this bad content, but a much worse message. Being able to recognize those bad messages when they do come up is what’s important.

Lets start now on the MPAA. First, the MPAA rates content first, then maturity age limits, and also looks at themes, though how much is questionable. If the content is bad, it automatically falls in the rating chart, no matter what themes that content is being used to teach, it is very possible the Book of Mormon if rated would receive an R rating, or more mature due to its violence and graphic descriptions.

The second way the MPAA rates is maturity levels. “Is a xx year old mature enough to handle what he sees and what he hears?” The first Matrix that came out was originally PG-13, until the directors thought it need to go to a mature-er audience and resubmitted the film. There is an age when children don’t understand the concept of death, and how a dead person doesn’t “wake up.” There is also an age that doesn’t understand complex emotions and motives behind many things that happen in modern cinema.

There is an odd trend among many directors and in Hollywood to make really good films with good messages R, some of the best films ever (message wise) may be R rated, but PG-13 films are sometimes notorious for the good-guy sleeping around and doing other equally bad things, the content stays clean (nothing is shown), but the message is just as bad as if you were to see him committing the wrong. In a significant way PG-13’s are worse than R’s, if you believe that message is more powerful on the human mind than content is (which it is).

These are the beginnings of ideas from which come: disregarding the MPAA entirely, or using a different moral rating system, or why the Church does not use the MPAA as a standard and references it in manuals, and why many people choose to watch whatever rating system guilt-free.

There might be a higher law: instead of avoiding R films and watching everything else and thinking you’re ‘good’- seeking good film and avoiding bad film, which really is what the prophets have told us all along, its just taken us a while to realize the MPAA is not a judge of how morally good/bad a movie is.

If you learn nothing else: Message is everything, and content isn’t.

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