see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

I love some of the fabulous resources you can find on the web, and the site I'm highlighting one today's wonderful web wednesday is one of those. (Disclaimer: this review is one I did on Boutique Cafe back in July, 2006 but felt it was time to mention it again.)

Okay, so maybe “evil” is a strong word, but if you’re like me, today’s movies can have unpleasant surprises buried in their PG ratings. I’ve rented a seemingly innocent PG movie and heard a thing or two I wish my little ones hadn’t. If you’d like to avoid such choice moments, check out Kids-In-Mind, a site whose mission is to “provide parents and other adults with objective and complete information about a film’s content so that they can decide, based on their own value system, whether they should watch a movie with or without their kids.”

The site doesn’t recommend a movie, place judgment, critique or criticize. They leave that up to you. What they do provide are extremely--and I mean, extremely--detailed descriptions of what the movies contain. As the site says, it’s kind of like reading a food nutrition label. You know exactly what you’re getting. They have three basic categories for rating a movie: Sex/Nudity, Violence/Gore, and Profanity, with a scale of 1 to 10. In the detailed review Kids-In-Mind actually lists in detail every occurrence of nudity, violence, or profanity. Let me tell you, it’s far better than relying on word-of-mouth!

Kids-in-Mind has movie reviews for both what’s now playing and what’s new on video, along with links to other websites where you can read what Ebert & Roeper have to say. Of course, I don’t think Ebert & Roeper actually counted the number of sexual references (0) and religious exclamations (5) or give you a list of discussion topics (sibling rivalry, divorce, separation, custody, obsessions, family, love, anger, disappointment, vengeance, suicide, mental illness, deathy) you’ll find in “Spiderwick.” -Emily