Bully is a documentary on bullying that follows the lives of bullied teenagers. By all accounts, it is a brilliant and important film, the sort of thing that young people should see. Except that they won't, because the MPAA's secretive, unaccountable ratings board has given it an R rating for "language." Despite widespread calls to reconsider (including 165,000 signatures gathered by a Katy Butler, a 17-year-old Michigan high school student) the MPAA is standing pat.
Redditor awertz23 suggests that people following this should go watch Kirby Dick's funny-but-horrifying documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, which investigates the MPAA ratings board. Dick hired a private investigator and determined the identities of the MPAA raters (a closely held secret) and discovered that the panel was not composed of parents of young children, frequently rotated through — rather, it was mostly composed of studio insiders who served extended tenures. Dick documents the complicity between the ratings board and the major studios and the crummy deal that indies get, and the systemic bias towards violence (including sexual violence) and against consensual sex, especially gay sex.
