Beyond “Bad Words and Violence”

Ann Roberts was monitoring movies for gratuitous sex and violence long before Bob Dole made boo-hissing Hollywood hip. Three years ago, the Colleyville woman created Parental Discretion, a four- to eight-page newsletter aimed at helping parents decide which flicks are for kids.

“Most people don’t have time to screen movies before letting their kids see it,” says the mother of two-year-old twin boys. “The [Motion Picture Association of America] ratings are so blurred now you can’t know what they really mean.”

So Parental Discretion, published every three weeks and available in hundreds of libraries across the country, sets out to tell parents what they can’t know without seeing a movie first. Roberts tallies up the killings and counts the curse words, letting readers know in what context each expletive is uttered. Films then get individual star-ratings for each of five age groups, ranging from toddler to adult.

Unlike other reviews that offer woe and warning to protective parents, PD is void of moralistic language and fire-and-brimstone condemnation. “There are parents who care about violence in movies that aren’t necessarily religious,” says Roberts. Even casual sex can have its place in films for teenagers when it reveals loneliness and emptiness resulting from a one-night stand.

Roberts is more than the heir apparent to the J recently deceased Dal]as Movie Classification Board. “It’s not enough information just to know there are some bad words or violence,” she says. Context is crucial in her judgments. Take, for example, her review of Swing Kids, the 1993 PG-13 film about German teenagers during World War II. “Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this film, though, is the way it glorifies the suicide of one of the Suing Kids. His decision to kill himselfby slitting his wrist is portrayed as heroic and noble…His death may seem courageous and inspirational to impressionable teenagers.”

Adding discussion topics after each review (for Swing Kids they are Hitler’s Third Reich, prejudice, peer pressure, suicide, and swing music), Roberts sometimes writes as if these movies are more than just entertainment. “It’s not just a movie to a kid,” she says. “It’s a big influence on how they see the world. Especially with the little ones, movies determine what they think is normal. “