With school out for summer, Kirsten Larson and Sydni Norris of Bloomington, Illinois, often head with their friends to the Parkway Cinemas. But they do not always pick the same movie to see.
Kirsten, 16, and Sydni, 15, can get into R-rated movies that their friends cannot view without an adult along. They each have an "R-card," a parent-permission slip issued by the GKC Theaters chain, which has theaters in 24 cities, including Bloomington, in five Midwestern states.
The R-card costs US$2 and allows youths to attend R-rated films unaccompanied by a parent or guardian, as would otherwise be the case for anyone 17 or younger.
So far the chain has sold about 700 R-cards at 10 of its theaters, said James Whitman, vice president for theater operations and marketing at GKC, who dreamed up the card. The company's theater in Elkhart, Ind., began offering it on Friday, and its theater in Traverse City, Michigan, a popular family resort area, will make it available next month.
But critics are denouncing the R-card as both a maneuver around the movie rating system -- which was set up to help parents sort out which movies were appropriate for their children -- and an abdication of parental responsibilities.
"It distorts it and disfigures" the rating system, said Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, which administers the ratings program. In a telephone interview from his Washington office, Valenti continued: "Not all R movies are alike. There are some R movies that children should not see."
Yet as long as the ratings have been administered, young people have found ways to get around them, like the generations-old practice of buying tickets for one movie and sneaking in to another. Ticket sellers and takers at many theaters are barely old enough to see R-rated movies themselves and occasionally encounter peer pressure not to bar their friends.
Ratings themselves manage to remain in dispute: Michael Moore loudly complained when his new picture, Fahrenheit 9/11 received an R rating, which means it will be seen only by an adult audience or young people accompanied by parents or guardians.
And also by the relatively modest number of youngsters who have R-cards.
The R-card came about this spring. Whitman said he was simply trying to serve a customer need: parents who were tired of sitting through ear-splitting pictures with their action-film-loving teenagers. "It was parents who were coming to the box office and saying, `You're forcing me to see a movie that I don't want to see,'" Whitman said.
He added, "You can't say it's a parental guideline and then say the parents have no choice."
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate