More MovieGuide musings

Since I don’t really have any notes to share from my video on MovieGuide’s evangelical take-down of Hereditary, I thought I’d make a quick post here talking about some of the other interesting pages I found that didn’t make it into the video. These might end up in a future video if I ever come back to MovieGuide, but I don’t really have any specific plans for that right now.

As an aside, if you plan to browse MovieGuide, which is very fun, I hope that you are doing so with an adblocker enabled!

Orgazmo

This is by far the most surprising thing I found on MovieGuide: it’s a review of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s movie about a Mormon missionary who finds a lucrative career in porn acting. I’m not a huge fan of Parker and Stone so I haven’t actually seen Orgazmo, but like, I can pretty well tell from the title that it’s not something an Evangelical audience would be interested in. Why did they find it necessary to review this? Who is this one for?

The following line: “At a screening of this 90-minute movie, there were only two or three laughs uttered by some of Trey Parker and his partner Matt Stone’s friends and groupies” makes me wonder if this was viewed at a press screening. And I guess that sort of contributes to this idea I have in my mind of the MovieGuide critic—someone who genuinely enjoys watching movies, even bad movies, just because he’s so fascinated by multitude of formal choices and expressions that are possible in the medium, but then feels like he must rationalize his excursions into the non-Christian terrain by protecting others from exposure to the same content. In a way I am probably projecting!

Also strange: the movie calls Orgazmo “the most offensive, unfunny movie to date,” but it still gets a 2/4 in Entertainment Quality. Isn’t that weird? Wouldn’t that qualify it for a 1/4 rating? The review also notes that “it is clear…that Trey Parker has talent,” but doesn’t elaborate on what makes it so clear. Think we might have a closet South Park fan on our hands.

A Quiet Place

While writing the Hereditary video, I spent some time trying to find the highest-rated horror movie on the site. At the time the best I could find was the review of A Quiet Place, which has a 4/4 in Entertainment Quality and only a -1 in Content. (The Conjuring comes close with a 4/4 but gets a -2 for Content.) I’ve only seen A Quiet Place once, back when it came out in 2018, so take the rest of what I’m about to say with that grain of salt.

For MovieGuide, what redeems A Quiet Place is its strong emphasis on familial love. But it turns out there’s not much to redeem in the first place: as the review notes, apart from the apocalyptic circumstance and a few moments of violence, there is very little bad behavior on display here: no sex, no drugs, no swearing, and no “miscellaneous immorality”. This wasn’t something I had really considered about the movie before, but pretty much all of the “evil” behavior is externalized to the aliens, who only briefly appear.

But to me, this was also a bit frustrating. Because, like, why are these people having a baby? I’m not saying it’s inherently evil to have a baby in an apocalyptic world or whatever, but it’s definitely an interesting and weird and probably bad decision that A Quiet Place seems to want us to just accept as a given. (I guess it makes sense that the MovieGuide review doesn’t question this either. Gotta keep popping out more little Christians.) A Quiet Place is a very character-driven film, but there’s not a lot of room for moral nuance in any of the characters. The family is just kind of presented as unambiguously good, even though there are some internal conflicts. And all the evil is coming from some foreign body that threatens the purity of the family. So yeah I guess that’s pretty Christian!

The ratings breakdown

The last thing I want to talk about (for now) is the MovieGuide ratings page. Because it’s a doozy. I did briefly mention this in the video because it explains the difference between the Content and Entertainment Quality ratings, but there’s a lot more here, including breakdowns of the possible worldviews (the “positive” worldviews are implicitly or explicitly Christian).

“Marx said that his Communism was the ultimate Humanism and advocated that a humanist society should abolish religion, abolish family, abolish nation, and abolish private property.”

Hell yeah!

Probably my favorite part of the ratings page is the glossary of abbreviations, because, like, are people supposed to just memorize these? To give a couple examples, quoted verbatim:

• AC – Anti-Communist element worldview (may be increased to ACAC)
• ACap – Anti-capitalism, anti-wealth, politics of envy (may be increased)
• FR – Light Non-Christian worldview, or false religions, such as Mormonism or Legalism
  • FRFR – Strong Non-Christian worldview, heresy or false religious elements
  • FRFRFR – Very strong Non-Christian, heresy or false religious elements
• HoHoHo – Very strong homosexual worldview or homosexual elements
• L – Few obscenities and profanities (1-9)
  • LL – Several obscenities and profanities (10-25)
  • LLL – Numerous obscenities and profanities (more than 25)
• PC – Politically correct worldview or elements (may be increased to PCPC or PCPCPC)

Sorry I’m just not going to read HoHoHo and get “oh this movie is mega gay” out of that.

Weird website, huh?