Looking for a couple of movie reviews the other day I found this site. Movie reviews from the point of view of the most fundamental of fundamentalists. They are great!
Their movie review system is called the WISDOM scale, in which each film is assigned a score from 0% to 100% in each of seven categories:
Wanton Violence/Crime
Impudence/Hate
Sex/Homosexuality
Drugs/Alcohol
Offense to God
Murder/Suicide
A score of 100% in a category means the movie is completely pure of the offending letter (although the exact formula is never revealed and I think it may be a bit subjective), anything lower means it exists. The average of all 6 scores gives you the CAP score
Lets look at some examples: The obvious first thing to check is Harry Potter. It contains all the usual stuff you expect people to complain about ("long sequence of an attack by a tree"; "petrified cat hanging upside down"; "graphic defensive killing with blood and incineration") along with lots of offense to God ("talking witches hat"). Overall Harry Potter gets 0% for violence and 0% for offense to God.
Next I checked out March of the Penguins, a beautiful documentary about the life of the emperor penguin. Somehow it managed to lose points for Sexual Immorality ("animal copulation (non-sensuous)"), because it sure is immoral that those penguins mate.
I don't even know which review to quote next, they're all so hugely quotable! Even in "Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie", one of the most sanitized, anodyne movies I can imagine, points are lost because one vegetable jumps into the ocean and drowns in order to save others (surely this is a good thing, and demonstrates the christian ideals of sacrifice and love for your friends!)
One thing in particular that really gets me about the reviews is the blatant double standards betweens films that the reviewer likes and films that he doesn't. For example he nails Sin City for "surviving impossible gunfire injuries that would result in death, repeatedly", and Silent Hill for "impossible change in scenery".
But Mary Poppins gets off scott-free even though it has
There is, I think, one use for this site. Films that make the fundamentalist reviewers go mental are likely to be exactly the sort of films that I want to see. In this spirit I started using the inverse CAP -- iCap=1/CAP -- as an indication of how much I would probably want to watch the film! Using the iCap measurement lets see what films are recommended:
In the bottom four (iCap = 1/100): Mary Poppins, Baby Miracle volume 1: The Miracle of Creation, Grandpa Friendly's Workshop and Who Gets the House (I can safely say that I don't want to watch a single one of these)
In the top four (iCap = INFINITY!): American Psycho, Scary Movie ("If you are offended by frank discussion of sexual and other vulgarities (as you should be) I encourage you to leave this report without reading the more detailed accounting of findings"), Sin City and Freddy vs. Jason
There is definitely some merit to my system!
Finally if you want a real laugh, check out Dogma
It's like in order for a movie to be acceptable to these people any semblance of humanity needs to be stripped away, leaving only a bland stream of social nicities and inoffensive smiles. The reviewer has undertaken a blanket assessment that "all conflict is bad" and "all sex is bad", nevermind that both of these processes are pretty much fundamental to being human and to storytelling.
The one thing I am left with is an overwhelming sense of sadness that there are people in the world who want to remove all sense of passion and excitement from our lives.
p.s. Chapter 2 of 1006 words has started to go up here. It couldn't be more different than the first set
Their movie review system is called the WISDOM scale, in which each film is assigned a score from 0% to 100% in each of seven categories:
Wanton Violence/Crime
Impudence/Hate
Sex/Homosexuality
Drugs/Alcohol
Offense to God
Murder/Suicide
A score of 100% in a category means the movie is completely pure of the offending letter (although the exact formula is never revealed and I think it may be a bit subjective), anything lower means it exists. The average of all 6 scores gives you the CAP score
Lets look at some examples: The obvious first thing to check is Harry Potter. It contains all the usual stuff you expect people to complain about ("long sequence of an attack by a tree"; "petrified cat hanging upside down"; "graphic defensive killing with blood and incineration") along with lots of offense to God ("talking witches hat"). Overall Harry Potter gets 0% for violence and 0% for offense to God.
Next I checked out March of the Penguins, a beautiful documentary about the life of the emperor penguin. Somehow it managed to lose points for Sexual Immorality ("animal copulation (non-sensuous)"), because it sure is immoral that those penguins mate.
I don't even know which review to quote next, they're all so hugely quotable! Even in "Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie", one of the most sanitized, anodyne movies I can imagine, points are lost because one vegetable jumps into the ocean and drowns in order to save others (surely this is a good thing, and demonstrates the christian ideals of sacrifice and love for your friends!)
One thing in particular that really gets me about the reviews is the blatant double standards betweens films that the reviewer likes and films that he doesn't. For example he nails Sin City for "surviving impossible gunfire injuries that would result in death, repeatedly", and Silent Hill for "impossible change in scenery".
But Mary Poppins gets off scott-free even though it has
- Impossible flying by umbrella
- Impossible floating by laughing
- Impossible going into a painting and riding sentient carousel horses (likely demonic)
There is, I think, one use for this site. Films that make the fundamentalist reviewers go mental are likely to be exactly the sort of films that I want to see. In this spirit I started using the inverse CAP -- iCap=1/CAP -- as an indication of how much I would probably want to watch the film! Using the iCap measurement lets see what films are recommended:
In the bottom four (iCap = 1/100): Mary Poppins, Baby Miracle volume 1: The Miracle of Creation, Grandpa Friendly's Workshop and Who Gets the House (I can safely say that I don't want to watch a single one of these)
In the top four (iCap = INFINITY!): American Psycho, Scary Movie ("If you are offended by frank discussion of sexual and other vulgarities (as you should be) I encourage you to leave this report without reading the more detailed accounting of findings"), Sin City and Freddy vs. Jason
There is definitely some merit to my system!
Finally if you want a real laugh, check out Dogma
It's like in order for a movie to be acceptable to these people any semblance of humanity needs to be stripped away, leaving only a bland stream of social nicities and inoffensive smiles. The reviewer has undertaken a blanket assessment that "all conflict is bad" and "all sex is bad", nevermind that both of these processes are pretty much fundamental to being human and to storytelling.
The one thing I am left with is an overwhelming sense of sadness that there are people in the world who want to remove all sense of passion and excitement from our lives.
p.s. Chapter 2 of 1006 words has started to go up here. It couldn't be more different than the first set
