Popular Movie Opinions That Show People Don’t Understand Movies

3 ‘Why Can’t Hollywood Cast Actual Teenagers to Play Teenagers?’

You’ve heard it before: Actors who play teenagers are too old, and that’s stupid. It was silly decades ago with kids on 90210 sporting receding hairlines, and it’s silly now with that one student on Stranger Things hiding deep wrinkles. How about you try casting a real teen for once? Not only will they look more convincing, they’ll act more convincingly because they’re authentically playing someone like themselves.

But productions cast adults to play teens because acting is work, and work is for adults. Kids should be in school, or should be playing with friends. Also, they cast adults instead of teens because adults act better than teens and look better than teens and are a whole lot more fun to be around than teens. The only reason to ever hire a teen when you can hire an adult is because you can probably pay the teen less, and even that’s not a very good reason.

There are laws restricting hiring children as actors. These may limit hours, make you leave room for schooling and (yes) also control how you pay them. These are arguably more lax than the laws for any other industry, since other industries are more likely to ban child labor altogether, but the laws are there, and you’d rather not be weighed down by them. 

I said adults act better than real teens do, which is true, and if you can name some teen actors who really can act well, they are rare gems. Close resemblance to the character you portray isn’t the most important factor when judging how well you can act. When we’re looking for someone to play a customer shopping in a deli, filming an actual customer in a deli might do the job, but when we want them to learn lines, emote or portray being in an imaginary situation, we want someone who has honed their skills for a few years.

Of course, there are limits to what the audience will accept. They may be unwilling to accept John Malkovich as a six-year-old girl, because they’re philistines. But if they might accept an adult in the role, you cast an adult in the role — and sometimes, audiences discover they accept this choice surprisingly readily.

I also said adults look better than teenagers. Sometimes, this doesn’t matter, such as The Last of Us above, where you’re supposed to feel like a parent to the character. In these cases, the makeup team will likely play down the actor’s real looks and make them look as young as possible. But other times, such as in the teen soaps that offer the most famous examples of geriatric adolescents, it does matter. These are supposed to be shows about pretty people and their drama, including relationship drama, and if that sounds superficial, your issue isn’t the casting — your issue is with the show’s whole premise. 

When two of these characters lock eyes and feel attracted to each other, you’re supposed to relate by feeling attracted as well. “You,” in that situation, refers not just to teens who watch the show but to the adults who do as well. If the actor looked like an actual teenager, that would feel less truthful to the story, because you wouldn’t be able to see them the way other characters do. And, of course, this all goes double if characters have sex or get naked, in which case we probably don’t want to make teen actors do that.

Some of this stuff about actors portraying characters different from themselves sounds reminiscent of the debate about playing outside your race, or acting disabled, but a lot of the issues people have there don’t apply here. Those advocates say getting cast would be a good opportunity for the actor, but when we’re talking about kids, becoming a child star is more likely to ruin their life. Ideally, no child would have a Hollywood career, for their sake. They’d be better off acting in school plays then not going pro till their childhood is done.

People are also concerned about representation for the sake of audience members wanting to see themselves onscreen, and out of fear that other kinds of actors can’t understand those characters. Well, all adults were once children, so everyone can understand kids if their memory works. And we needn’t think of children at home as a voiceless group. They will inherit the earth from us and will live to dance on our graves. 

2 ‘I Take in Movies Much Better When I Turn On Subtitles’

When Parasite won at the 2020 Oscars, director Bong Joon Ho urged everyone to seek out more foreign movies. “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles,” he said, “you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Those words come off very different now, because a few years later, many viewers now report enabling subtitles on everything they watch, whether foreign or not. 

They have a good reason for this — often, the sound is mixed so poorly that they need subtitles to understand what people are saying. In that sense, it’s similar to watching foreign movies, in that they’re unintelligible without subtitles. But if you can understand dialogue using your ears, subtitles don’t help you take in the movie more, despite what some people insist. Instead, you take in the movie less. 

The reason comes down to the mechanics of the eye. The light-sensitive cells in your eye are concentrated in a tiny region called the fovea. The fovea laser-focuses on a spot in front of you and on nothing else, while your few remaining cells elsewhere in the eye see everything else far less sharply. The only reason you feel like you have a wide field of clear vision is because your eyes constantly move, focusing your fovea on new spots — and because your imagination fills in everything your fovea doesn’t capture. 

To demonstrate this, set aside your instincts and purposely keep your eyes totally still. Focus on one single word in this sentence. Now, try reading the rest of this article without moving your eye at all. You can’t do it. Everything other than the closest text looks too blurry.

When you watch a movie, your eyes constantly dance to different parts of the screen, much like when you look at any scene in the real world. But when you read the subtitles, your fovea fixates at the bottom of the screen throughout your time reading those lines. You think you’re picking up everything else on the screen, but you’re really picking up a blur like that blurry text I just asked you to try to read. 

Think of all you miss. Resolution might be the most obvious — you may have sought out the best Blu-ray or 4K, but none of that clarity reaches your eye if you’re staring only at the bottom text. You miss so many details in the scene. You even miss the expressions characters are making. While you’re reading that line, you’re almost taking the movie in as a second-screen experience.

Though, at least it ensures you aren’t actually taking the movie in as a second-screen experience, which I suppose is otherwise an option. 

1 ‘The MPAA Is Saying Sex Is More Immoral Than Violence!’

The Motion Picture Association (formerly known as the Motion Picture Association of America, or the MPAA) assigns movies ratings like PG-13 and R. When you look into how these ratings work, you uncover a lot of ridiculousness. One documentary on the subject, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, is mandatory viewing for anyone interested in the subject, and people have spotted a bunch of hypocrisies in how innocuous scenes attract harsher ratings.

Violence is rated more leniently than sex, which seems wrong, since violence is bad while sex is (usually) good. Even sexual violence may be rated more leniently than consensual sex, which sounds absurd. Some types of sex attract especially harsh ratings, with censors apparently counting the specific number of thrusts in each encounter. Shots of a woman enjoying sex likely earn an R rating or worse. And when it comes to violence, a fight that produces visible injuries will receive a harsher rating than one that doesn’t — even though showing the consequences of violence really offers an anti-violence message that might benefit kids in the audience.

Put this all together, and it’s clear the MPA have a very screwed-up idea of exactly what’s moral and what isn’t.

Except, rating movies isn’t about labeling characters’ conduct as immoral. At least, the MPA doesn’t say it is, and it also doesn’t succeed at that in practice, so if you’re saying they fail at judging morality correctly, you’re accusing the MPA of failing at something they never claimed to do. Hollywood used to restrict movies based on whether they depicted sinful behavior, back in the days of the Hays Code, but that’s not the basis of ratings now, which is good, because movies shouldn’t be classified on those grounds. 

When the MPA says a violent movie is “inappropriate” for children, they aren’t saying it sends a bad message. They’re saying it’s graphic. Gory violence is more disturbing than bloodless violence. When they say language is inappropriate, they’re saying the movie has lots of swears. This remains true even if the swearing comes in the form of a tool a king uses to avoid stuttering. The observation here isn’t that the act is immoral. 

For sex, they’re rating how sexual the scene is. At a certain point, the scene is trying to turn the viewer on, which is allowed, but parents would want to know the movie is going to do that before watching it with their child by their side. Go even further (reasons the MPA), and the sex moves into pornographic territory, in which case they’ll label that as something no child should be admitted to see.

Imagine a scene in which a newly married couple enter their bedroom and have sex, and imagine that the movie shows it all. The camera captures everything (lights are on, and there are no sheets covering anyone), and the movie films this for half an hour. What rating would the MPA give this movie? The harshest possible, surely, or they may deny it a rating altogether. 

So, are they saying a husband and wife having sex is immoral? Of course not. The agency here is just labeling the scene as graphic.

You should still object to various details of the rating process, and if you review everything about what the MPA considers pornographic, you’ll find plenty to criticize. But to see the method to the madness, you must realize that rating a movie “inappropriate” isn’t the same as labeling its actions immoral.

They rate the length of sex scenes because a longer scene has more time to turn the viewer on. A loving sex scene might earn a movie an NC-17 rating while a rape might not because the loving scene is more likely to turn the viewer on than the rape. Covering up a bare butt with blood will appease censors because it blocks the sexy butt from the camera, and the blood won’t disturb the viewer as much as the butt will excite them because we all know the blood’s fake, while the butt is real. A woman’s orgasm will earn a harsher rating than a man’s because a woman’s is deemed more erotic, which is a double standard, obviously, but that’s different from declaring female pleasure immoral.

There’s even more we can dig into, but I’ll cut this short because this whole issue might be decreasingly relevant. Moviegoers have shifted more and more to streaming, where MPA ratings make no difference. Plus, if you believe the surveys, the younger generation is no longer resisting sex being censored but instead want sex scenes eliminated, so they can watch all movies with their parents, unembarrassed.

That’s a very confusing development because if you watch movies at home, it’s now more convenient than ever to watch them alone, without parents, on your personal devices. Put the movie on in your room, and if you’re afraid of the moaning bothering your parents next door, use headphones (this also allows you to hear more clearly, even without subtitles). Watch the sex scenes without shame. Don’t worry — those actors aren’t actual teenagers.

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