Thursday, May 17, 2012

You Gotta Check Out: Common Sense Media


Avengers Set
The Avengers movie is a sizzler and having all those super heroes in one movie is just too good to be true if you're a Marvel fan. But, The Avengers, in spite of the hype and peer pressure to see it, may be out of our league. My 10-year old son has been begging to see it and uses supporting data like, "My friends have all seen it" to argue his case.


I'll admit, The Avengers movie does hold a special place in our hearts. While filming the movie in our own city-made-to-look-like New York, we went to the movie set (my son has wanted to be a film director since the age of 3). The movie crew was so nice to him, they even gave him a piece of rubble as a souvenir (looks like any old rock, really). So, it would be cool to see all those scenes we saw filmed on the big screen (although the trailer itself does a great job).


Crew installing safety glass to protect real glass during explosion scenes.
So, when I'm up against this kind of cultural pressure, I like to make my points with fact, not just "mommy-opinion" and I use Common Sense Media for that exact purpose. Simply type in "The Avengers" in the search box, and the site rewards you with a plethora of information regarding language, sexual content, violence levels, etc. Here's the link. This site rates movies, games, videos, TV shows, websites, apps, books, and music. We use this site as a gauge for many of our movie-making decisions - he's only 10 and we'd rather not rush things along, thank you.



Note: I was not compensated in any way by Common Sense Media. It's a great, informative site and I wanted to share it with you to put into your parenting arsenal.


So will your child be seeing The Avengers? How old?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you on Common Sense Media, we use it all the time - especially for movies.

I'll be dragging my children to The Avengers - I have a slightly all consuming, obsessive crush on Robert Downey, Jr.

;)

xomichele

Michelle said...

Soooooo...... then what is your final decision after weighing all the facts??????

I am LOVD said...

Good question, Michelle! I'm hoping my son doesn't ask again to see it until it's out of theaters. I'm erring on the side of not going to see it. There seems to be a lot of comments about excessive violence. People relate to Star Wars but I think there's a big difference between light saber battles and knives being thrown to kill into people's backs (beginning of movie). So, I hope I'm strong enough to not yield to peer pressure as many of my friends' kids have already seen it.

Common Sense Media said...

Thank you so much for this thoughtful post! We are so glad to see you and your friends finding our site helpful. Keep in touch!

 

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