Movies for Children

As I have briefly mentioned, I have reviewed films for Kids-In-Mind for about a year. This useful and effective company's services give parents and guardians of children and youth all the information they need to have in order to make rational, intelligent and prudent choices for their children's film viewing.

This company maintains a website that reveals all the data available on nearly all movies being released. The reviews provided by this site include all the action and content in each film reviewed, in the areas of

• Nudity and Sex
• Violence
• Profanity
• Substance use - alcohol and legal and illegal drugs
• Stereotypical slurs
• Topics to discuss wth children because these topics will likely raise questions for them and
• Film message(s) [overall].

The site is free to use and can provide a lot of answers to questions parents ahve about films. Parents may read the reviews before they decide whether each film examined is right for their child(ren). No judgment values are made in the reviewing process and personal opinions are not given. The hard data are simply put into the public eye and each individual may use the information to make specific decisions.

The following are some excepts from an recent article:

"We make no recommendations whatsoever, neither good, bad or indifferent," said Aris Christofides, who runs the site with his wife, Lori Pearson.

The Dublin couple believe they can serve the public better simply by listing all the elements in a movie-violence, sex, nudity, profanity, drug use and even insults-that might make it inappropriate for children. "Anything," said Pearson, "that might raise questions in a child's mind.

Unlike some religious-oriented sites, Kids-in-Mind's operators say, they aren't trying to keep parents and their children away from certain films. They simply put objective information out there, and then let parents decide for themselves. After all, Christofides said, different families have varying ideas about what's appropriate. Some people are bothered by violence, others are bothered by sex. To each his own."

Patty Inglish, one of the people who review movies for Kids-in-Mind, acknowledged that some movies make her job harder than others. The recent children's fantasy August Rush, for example, left her with little to do, while the western 3:10 to Yuma kept her note-taking hand busy. "There was so much gunfire and other violence in addition to harsh language and sexual content," she said, conversing via e-mail. "I was writing constantly."

The result was a review that devoted 21 of its 26 paragraphs solely to the movie's violence and gore, beginning with: "A man is shot in the abdomen 4 times and drops to the ground. A man shoots and kills several men in quick succession. An elderly man is shot, we see blood soak his shirt, and he falls and crawls away."