Back in my high school and early college years, if there was a movie I was thinking of seeing but wasn’t sure about the appropriateness of its content, I would pay a visit to either Kids-In-Mind.com or Screenit.com, two sites that provided objective analysis of content in movies, particularly the kind that parents or morally discerning types might be concerned about. Kids-In-Mind rates the amount of sex/nudity, violence/gore, and profanity each on a 0-10 scale, and gives somewhat detailed explanations of how much of each is shown on screen, usually without giving away key plot points that be involved in those scenes.
Today they break up their analysis in bullet points, one for each individual scene being described. For instance, here’s how the Kids-In-Mind page for the new movie Twilight described two scenes that earned mention in the sex/nudity category:
► A vampire teen boy and a teen girl kiss tenderly, then passionately, she leans back on her bed (she is wearing a T-shirt and panties) pulling him on top of her, they continue to kiss, and he jumps off and tells her to stop.
► A teen girl and a boy vampire dance close together at a dance, they kiss, she asks him to bite her neck, and he dips her and kisses her neck instead.
It describes exactly what you hear and/or see on the screen, giving little-to-no context for it, but making it clear that the instances described there are in different scenes. Unfortunately, in years past that site didn’t split up their descriptions into their respective scenes and instead just mentioned all the content in the movie that fell into their respective categories, which sometimes lead to some hilarious confusion.
The 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates, which takes place during the drawn-out World War II battle of Stalingrad in Russia, doesn’t have much sexual content to speak of, but it does have one (quite unnecessary) scene where two characters have sex in the middle of a large room full of people who are sleeping. I saw the movie with my dad when it was first released because he’s a history teacher and he wanted to watch it for its historical aspects. I read over the movie’s Kids-In-Mind page before watching the movie, and it left me a little bewildered. Here’s the entire paragraph the site dedicated to describing the movie’s sex/nudity content:
“A few kisses and a couple of kissing scenes (with a few kisses in each scene, but not any “making out” scenes). An extended sex scene takes place in barracks while people are sleeping around the couple; the couple kiss and put their hands down each other’s pants, then the man thrusts on top of the woman (the woman’s bare buttocks are shown briefly). We see the side of a man’s bare buttocks (he passes gas to blow out a candle).”
The described sex scene and the incident at the end of the paragraph take place in completely different scenes probably an hour apart, but when I first read that paragraph I got the impression that they took place in the same scene, since the writer made no effort to put them in different scenes or explain the context of the latter one. The mental image that the paragraph gave me was one where Jude Law and Rachel Weisz (the two actors in the movie’s sex scene) are in bed kissing and either having sex or about to begin, and in the middle of it, Jude Law rolls over and passes gas toward a candle to blow it out and make the room go dark. Of course that’s not how the scene played out but it was the idea I got from Kids-In-Mind. This week I randomly remembered the confusion I had about that, and laughed hysterically for a long time. I asked a co-worker if he’d seen the movie, and then described the false impression Kids-In-Mind had given me about its sex scene. We had a lot of fun discussing what the dialogue would have sounded like had the scene actually taken place the way I’d first imagined it. (Example: “There’s too much light in the room, honey. Here, watch this trick!”)
Truly, had they staged the scene like that, it would have been the funniest (and probably least romantic) moment in any movie I’ve ever seen, by far. If only they’d explained the content by scene and not lumped it all together back then, misunderstandings like that wouldn’t have happened. Context truly makes all the difference.
That’s the funniest memory that has randomly come back to me in a long time.
