The Ziggurat of Doom

I saw a commercial for the movie Everyone’s Hero today, and saw that it boasted a five star rating from something called the Dove Foundation. After looking around the site, it looks like the Dove Foundation is a conservative Christian advocacy group that identifies and rates movies that fit it’s definition of family friendly. Good enough. Probably a very useful service some people. I don’t know if they do other things, but for the purpose of this, I’m only going to focus on that.

This kind of reminds me of two new, but important, players in the world of politics this year. In the blue trunks, in the left corner, are then Netroots, a loose conglomeration of progressive blogs best known for promoting Ned Lamont over Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary. In the red trunks, in the right corner, is the Club for Growth, a more traditional advocacy group that endorses and funds ‘progrowth’ challengers in Republican primaries.

These three organizations have a straight forward, public possition, and aren’t particularly motivated to ‘sell out’ in order to make a profit or get themselves into office. Compared to a movie promoter or political candidate, they can probably be relied upon to stick to their guns more often. There are a number of other advocacy groups that do the same thing, but I’m going to be picking out aspects of these three. Media rating from Dove, loose conglomeration from the Netroots, and sticking to a single topic from the CfG.

I kind of like the idea of advocacy groups that do single topic ratings, because it gives me an additional choice that I can take when I’m rationally ignorant of something, or as a good place to start looking when I want to no longer be ignorant. For example, if I have to babysit my young nieces, I can probably plop them down in front of any Dove Foundation approved movie without worrying that they’ll be (accidently) horribly emotionally scared (while I’m not there). Seriously, who wants to miss that. Similarly, if I have to watch the movie with them, I could find a list of movies approved by Dove, and then look for reviews online for one’s that don’t suck.

Where am I going with this?

Oh yeah. As the number of possibilities increases, the cost to educate yourself about all of them increases. It occurs to me that in genre media like comics, anime, and scifi movies, there’s a wide variety types of stories a movie, book, or series could be. Many of those are probably going to be very bad choices for entertaining me, even if they are pretty good. Compare this to say chick flick movies or biographies. Those types of movies or books can range widely in quality, but they don’t have a pretty small breadth of styles.

In my sci fi movies, I usually like military drama, social commentary, and good writing. I really don’t care about special effects or good directing. So consider if there were a bevy of media advocacy groups that rated sci fi movies:
Captain Skippy’s Crazy Genetic Adventure!

• Grunts (military ratings): Accuracy: C Drama: A
• Psience!(science accuracy) Accuracy: 8/10 Visualization: 3/10
• Literate Alien(industry ratings) Writing: 70% Acting:80% Lighting: 70% Directing: 45% etc, etc, etc
• 4 Dude’s and a 6 Pack (‘guy’ ratings) kaBoom: F, Boobs: F, Busted Knuckles: D Bullets: F
• Son of Asimov(pretentious ‘spec fiction’) relevance: A originality: B thought provoking: A

So if these rating systems were around, I’d be able to see that yes, this wildly unsuccessful, under advertised movie would be perfect for me.

But they don’t exist, and I didn’t watch Captain Skippy’s Crazy Genetic Adventure! Gattaca for like 5 years.