Talk:Plugged In

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[edit] "Controversy" section

Whoever keeps adding it, I really don't think there needs to be one. Has the magazine ever caused a notable controversy, anytime, anywhere? I doubt most people know it even exists.

"Some Christian parents consider the magazine to be a valuable source in determining which entertainment outlets concur with their values. However, other individuals feel that they rarely have anything positive to say about a movie, and will excessively condemn films for containing minor amounts of suggestive content."

Lines like that are just weasel words and unnecessary. It goes without saying that "other individuals" aren't going to like a Christian right magazine.

[edit] Artistic Value and Morals

I changed this:

their reviews primarily focus on how moral or immoral they perceive entertainment media to be, rather than evaluating artistic value.

To this:

their reviews focus on evaluating the morals of movies as well as their artistic value.

They don't focus solely on morals. See, for example, their review of Babel:

"Babel, which borrows its title from the Genesis 11 account of the moment in history when God scrambled humankind's languages and locations to limit our effectiveness at achieving corporate evil, is a masterpiece of raw cinematic emotion hung on a framework of muddled messages and extreme content. As an exercise in empathy, Iñárritu's stories nailed me. Once I bought into the characters and their settings (and to the director's credit, I bought hard), every moment of the film was drenched in anxiety, sorrow and dread. The fact that not all of the tales end in utter loss offered little relief. And the movie's sadness hung with me long after I left the theater.

Babel undoubtedly captures the truth that we're all united in our sorrows. As the director told Entertainment Weekly, "Tolstoy said that happiness is what gets families together. I think what really connects human beings is what makes us miserable." Point taken. Loss of loved ones. Regret for wrong choices that lead to irreparable consequences. Dashed hopes for our children's innocence. We are joined by these experiences, sure, but is that enough of a moral to justify enduring the exquisite pain of this collection of characters—and the sometimes excruciatingly explicit rendering of their flailings? Are we so numb to the agonies of real people in our neighborhoods and on our small screens every night, so unable to make the leap of empathy without a narrative that we need a fictional big-screen reminder that it's happening everywhere?

Perhaps. But at what cost? And should exposure to graphic sexual solicitations and total nudity, among other trouble spots in the film, be part and parcel with the process?

Iñárritu also told EW, "The film is about prejudice and the dangerous walls we build that affect [communication] personally. And on a global scale, between George Bush and the Muslim world." So it seems that he wants us to take away more than just sadness for all the heartache in the world. Powerful performances delivered in five separate languages under harsh conditions around the globe, and amazing cinematography, visual collections of desolate beauty didn't get this part of the job done, though. Why? In a sentence, it's not the experience of the characters.

It's true that cultural barriers compound the anxiety and isolation each grapples with, but the truest suffering springs from the consequences of much more personal choices. Babel illustrates, whether Iñárritu wants it to or not, that universal human suffering springs less from our misunderstandings and lack of compassion than from the decisions we make that hurt ourselves and those we love—and our misguided responses to the resulting pain. We (and our families) are in much greater need of saving from ourselves than we are from divisive cultural barriers.

In our confused, intersecting and interlocking, post-Babel world, the movie Babel offers no real hope of salvation from the source of our sufferings. I know of only one: the God who offers forgiveness and hope through the sufferings of His Son in the universal language of unconditional love."

It's not like they say "this movie has nudity, therefore it ought to be banned"