The ABC Family movie "CyberBully" (lets call this a "review")

Okay so recently I watched this movie on Netflix Instant, which I`ve heard good things about and figured I would watch it and see for myself. CyberBully was supposed to be an "eye opener" for people who weren`t yet aware of bullying on the Internet. It was supposed to allow parents to have a way to talk to their kids about the Internet and bullying in general, and while it was well-meaning, I found the movie to have more of a mixed message than anything.
   For me, the message I got from the movie was "Don`t trust your family or your friends," which I am hoping wasn`t the true message. The bullying in the movie felt like it was dreamt up by a group full of former Prom Queens and Quarterbacks who had never experienced true bullying. This is not to say that any bulling should be tolerated, but merely that this was very G rated bullying and I found it to be slightly comical that Taylor would try to kill herself over the words of others.

  The movie is about Taylor, an "average" teenager with friends. She`s not super popular, but she`s not a geek. Her father recently left the family and she has developed a bit of a bullying problem with  one of the popular girls at school. She shares a laptop with her mother and brother and is a bit of a gossip with her friends Samantha and Cheyenne. Taylor`s mom buys her her own laptop for her birthday and allows her to make a profile on a social website called Cliquesters (which is equivalent to Facebook.)
         I am going to pause here to comment a bit on this. I am only 22, and I have a 2 year old, BUT when my son finally joins the online world I am going to make DAMN sure he knows what he is getting into, what can happen, what WILL happen and that I am here to talk to about it. Throughout the movie Taylor kept everything secret from her mom in shame and the mother banned her from Cliquesters, which we all know just makes kids want to use it more...and she DID. The movie has very poor communication between the whole family, which is common in American families today. Parents need to set aside time to have conversations with their kids at a very young age about these things, build bonds and forge relationships to keep this kind of thing from happening.

       So Taylor makes an account on this site and posts all sorts of pictures of herself and her friends and puts up all sorts of information about herself for the world to see, obviously uncaring that people can see all of this and use it against her. It comes as a big surprise when the popular girl at school, Lindsay, starts making rude comments on her pictures and talks about her in a chat room. Obviously this social site didn`t give the option to put her profile on private. Her brother begs her to make an account for him and Taylor refuses, so later that week her brother hacks her account and makes a status something along the lines of "I`m a dirty girl who needs to be spanked"
    Okay so, obviously when her mother allowed her to make a profile on this site she did not correctly warn her child, or supervise anything, or even look at the site to see if there were privacy settings. She did not teach her child not to listen to other people, or to believe in herself. The brother was only grounded for his actions too, my dad would have beat the hell out of me if I pulled a stunt like that. The mother was just like "I`m very disappointed in you Eric." Fuck that! I would be beating his ass with a belt until I could see bone, that shit is ridiculous.

    Of course since there were no filters in Taylor`s profile everyone saw the status and went crazy. Taylor was humiliated and had to do the walk of shame at school and whatnot. During all of this her love interest Scott is still talking to her, but another boy appears. James, an online profile who seems to be a perfect match for her, stands up for her against the bullyers in the chat room. He quickly becomes a confidant to Taylor, and she tells him everything. Just throws abandon to the wind and tells this pictureless stranger everything about her life, because obviously her mother never taught her not to talk to strangers.
  Over the next few weeks Taylor is bullied by the popular kids. She doesn`t even try to stand up for herself. Her friends turn their backs on her, and then James posts a status saying he caught the Clap from Taylor.
      Taylors mother really dropped the ball somewhere here. She never taught her daughter to have a thick skin. My dad always told me two things "suck it up" and "deal with it"...and I did LOL.  Girl calls me a slut, am I a slut? No? then WHY THE HELL would I get all worked up over it? Someone says I`m stupid. Am I? No? THEN WAHH GET OVER IT.  Kids today are placed in bubble nests stuffed with unicorn hair and pixie farts, they never learn to deal with anything. Bullying is a very big issue and from both ends. Parents don`t teach their kids NOT to bully, and they also don`t teach them  how to deal with it. They`re not talking to their kids and then are baffled when they commit suicide. How do you not know what the hell your kids are doing? 
   So then Taylor goes into emo mode and puts a video up about how she`s going to kill herself, which in reality a video just means you DONT want to kill yourself and you`re biding time trying to find someone to stop you. (Her brother was in the house, didn`t have a clue) Samantha sees the video and rushes over to find Taylor failing at removing a non childproof cap from a pill bottle. Seriously girl, can`t even get dying right?



Okay so all jokes aside it was a decent movie, but there is so much more to bullying than this craptastic movie. In high school I was out every night with my herd ofJuggalos. I was slapping on facepaint and running through the streets at night, wandering around Walmart. There was plenty of times where drugs were passed right by my face and I NEVER partook. I drank, but never enough to end up like any of them. We have a video of this one cracked out chick so drunk she passed out on the table and slammed her face into the floor. I found it stupid to end up like that, because those videos are still going around, and one day her son is going to see that.
   I was the friend who took hits, spent my paychecks on gas only to stay with my friends. I let one of them cut me so they wouldn`t cut themselves and I dealt with so much bullying it wasn`t even funny, but you know what? I`m still here. I stayed level headed and didn`t let it get to me.
  Bullying is a serious problem in todays society, on both ends of the spectrum. Too many times I see these videos of these kids killing themselves over stupid shit. They are words people. They can hurt but they don`t make you actually bleed. If you are a parent reading this, find the time to talk to your children. If you`re a child/teen/whatever, talk to your parents if something is bothering you.


Remember once something is on the internet it can never be erased. Surf Cautiously

Cyber-Bullying: Issues and Solutions for the School, the Classroom and (Google Affiliate Ad)

Reference from a friend "This Film is not yet rated"

So my friend Jackie told me about his documentary that shows us how films get rated and I thought I would do another "watch while blogging" blog about it.

So far its given us a bit of a background about how parents started rating films so they could tell others which movies were safe to bring their children to. Then we get a lovely, stirring opening full of blocked out sex scenes.

Then we meet the person who wrote "boys don`t cry" and she tells us how there`s a scene where the guy comes up from eating his girlfriend out and wipes the cum off his face, and instantly they slap an NC-17 rating on it, but then later the writer kills the character very violently and they don`t say a word about it which kinda sets her off. This gives us just a taste of how inconsistent the raters are. Then they say that the girl`s orgasm is too long, which doesn`t make any sense until you watch the orgasm for yourself and see that it`s scary to the raters because it`s about female pleasure.

Then they have voice recordings of other writers talking about the stupid things they`ve had to do. They have had to cut their films or alter them to remove dildos, to remove any chance of woman-on-woman action etc. The raters refuse to give an actual "list" of stuff they disprove of and therefore mark NC-17 but seem very inconsistent, and who`s to say that they are actually right for thinking such things anyway? Why should the opinions of these people come into play? Maybe they should just make a list and if a film has a certain amount of the things on the list then they categorize the film that way.

These people think that they are "gods" of a sort, that get to lay the standards for films when its all sort of childish. The ratings are as follows:

G: general audiences, no nudity, sex or drugs and violence must be minimal and cartoonish and may contain "children`s" curse words such as "rats", "darn", or "fart."

PG: parental guidance. There may be curse words, brief nudity and light violence such as getting kicked in the ass etc.

PG-13: this is for parents who don`t mind getting questions from their kids. "Shit" is not acceptable, and so is "fuck" but only once in the whole movie. Also depends on the manner in which the "Fuck" was said. If it was at someone it is fine but if it refers to sex or anything sexual it isn`t accepted. Seriously? How does this make any sense?

If there is any sexual innuendo and any violence or drugs it is immediately given an R

R: restricted. No children under 18 unless accompanied by an adult. This isn`t an all out free for all though. There may be sex, nudity and tough violence and frank sex talk. But the sex has to be only missionary. Anything depicting anything other than missionary, involving fetishes, old people, animals or anything the rating people just plain don`t like such as gay or lesbian sex, it gets slapped with an NC-17

NC-17: no children under 17. period. And if you get an NC-17 you risk not getting advertising which hurts the money made from the film.

If you choose not to accept the rating, you don`t get commercials, radio or anything advertising. No stores really carry nc-17s, walmart, kmart etc. So pretty much you cut your film to fit their needs or you don`t make any money.

then we learn a bit more about how people have been treated by the ratings people and I finally get an answer to an old question "What is an independent film'?

Well as it turns out an independent film is a filmmaker who dished out the money to get the film produces without having it rated. They seek to operate without all the restrictions of today. So maybe watch more Independent films to get a better viewing experience.

Out of 3o countries the MPAA doesn`t disclose who the rating people are, so it could be your neighbor, or your mom lol. It is actually really odd that this agency who is "working for us" won`t actually tell us who they are.

Then the producer decides to hire a private investigator and we follow the PI around. We learn that there isn`t a way to just walk into the MPAA building. They wait for a few cars to leave around lunch time so they can be followed and see if we can talk to them or discover who they are.

We meet a few people who have decided to speak out and share some secrets from within and we do learn that there is no training process, or charting process to determine what each film should be rated. They were offended by what some of the others had to say about movies that had been cut and it made them feel uneasy.

What I find interesting is that even with all the secrecy, the government hasn`t stepped in. And the rules and rating system is against the first amendment, so anyone off the street could mount a case against the MPAA but no one has because they are afraid. No one knows what would happen, and there are probably enough people who support these ratings to keep the MPAA functioning.

Sony, Warner Brothers, Universal, Walt Disney, Fox and Paramount control more than 95% of the US film industry, and guess who`s side they are on? The MPAA. No onder people are making more and more independent films these days. And these companies have sister companies that all together control over 90% of all media in the United States. After an excerpt from the MPAA confidentiality statement it is made clear that they do not want anyone knowing what is said within that building`s walls. When asked to give a list of what employees or former employees aren`t allowed to discuss, they refused. This way they are able to sue anyone who has worked for them at any given time because these people don`t know what they can and cannot talk about.

Armed with a tiny spy camera, the Pi and her friend`s daughter are following an employee as they emerge from the MPAA building, in hopes of getting some answers. We manage to get a glimpse of some possible raters.

Then we hear some more inconsistencies. "The cooler" was given and NC-17 because there was some pubic hair but in "Scream" or one of the parody's I don`t really know, the woman got her fake breast ripped out and that movie got rated an "R"

That`s all I really have to say, I`m 38 minutes into the movie so I`m sure it will get more controversial but you`ll have to watch it and see for yourself. It is on Netflix "This film is not yet rated"