And the winner is...

According to Wikipedia, the top grossing movies worldwide in 2010 were:

1.  Toy Story 3
2.  Alice in Wonderland
3.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 1
4.  Inception
5.  Shrek Forever After
6.  Twilight Saga:  Eclipse
7.  Ironman 2
8.  Despicable Me
9.  How to Train Your Dragon
10.  Clash of the Titans

Here's the MPAA rating for each of those movies.

1.  Toy Story 3 - G
2.  Alice in Wonderland - PG-13
3.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt 1 - PG-13
4.  Inception - PG-13
5.  Shrek Forever After - PG
6.  Twilight Saga:  Eclipse - PG-13
7.  Ironman 2 - PG-13
8.  Despicable Me - PG
9.  How to Train Your Dragon - PG
10.  Clash of the Titans - PG-13

First thing to note (and completely off the topic of this post), how did Toy Story 3 escape with a G-rating?!  Despite it being my favorite movie of the year, it is perhaps the darkest and scariest of the TS-Trilogy.  Perhaps a swap of ratings between TS-3 and Despicable Me.  Other than that, I can abide the ratings.

Second thing to note which will flow into the third note:  Four animated films.  Was a time when the animated fare was mediocre at best, just something to take your kids to to break up a monotonous month.  Not any more.  I think I enjoyed the three animated movies I saw, TS3, DM, and How to Train Your Dragon, more than my six- and eight-year old daughters, and would highly recommend all three.  Mature fair all in the classic sense of the word and not in the MPAA sense of the word (which has zilch to do with maturity).

Now to the meat.  Did you notice anything interesting about the Top 10 of 2010?  Not an R-rating to be seen.  Not an F-bomb dropped in the 24-hours of movies.  Not an exposed breast.  I've seen six of the top-10, and while I wouldn't recommend some of those for your pre-schoolers, each was a worthy night of movie watching.

Why does explicit sex, mostly of the extra-marital and non-standard variety, make a movie more arty (reference the Oscar contenders again this year)?  Why does profanity make a picture more profound?  I've watched HBO's outstanding work Band of Brothers three-times now through a TVG filter which removes the profanity.  I don't think I missed an iota of what Spielberg and Hanks intended for this saga.

I bring this up because I have heard great things about The King's Speech and 127 Hours.  Both have received acclaim in conservative circles, and both are laced with profanity.  But why?

Let's take The King's Speech as an example.  TKS is a movie about England's stuttering monarch, George VI, played by the superb Colin Firth (the outstanding Mr. Darcy in the BBC's Pride and Prejudice).  Why the profanity?  Meredith Whitmore on Focus on the Family's outstanding film review web-site, Plugged-In, explains.

This touching, masterfully acted and subtly comedic film could easily have been PG-rated, making its stirring message readily available for teens and families hungry for an inspiring life lesson devoted to clawing one's way past shortcomings and limitations. Instead, director Tom Hooper opted for a profanity-laden R rating. Several times Albert angrily blurts out long streams of curse words during speech therapy, since the only times he doesn't stutter are when he sings and when he swears.

Regarding the foul language and its resulting rating, star Colin Firth told The National Post, "This isn't a non-issue. I get that people don't want their small children hearing these strong words—I don't like them. … I don't want my kids thinking it's a good way to use language—language is more beautiful than that. It should be more thought about than that. It has more power than that. That's lazy and ugly—but that's not the case in this movie. [The foul language usage is] not vicious, it's not sexual, and it's not lazy—it's anything but. These are tools, these forbidden words have become momentary tools to get a guy to break out of extreme repression. Then he immediately gets rather sheepish and apologizes. There couldn't be a more harmless context. It doesn't teach your kids to sprinkle your language with these words or direct them against people. I would hate to deny kids in that age bracket, or discourage them from seeing a film which has so much to say to people that age."

Firth continues, "As far as the rest of public opinion is concerned, certainly in our industry, I'd be kicking in a door. Because everyone seems to be in harmony on the subject."

Were I to see the edited version on a plane or on TV, will the movie lack impact?  I doubt it.  The King's Speech, because of it's R-rating, will continue to earn lavish critical acclaim.  It will earn substantially less because millions of Americans would rather not subject themselves to the profanity-laced barrages that they have to endure in the workplace.  Same goes for 127 Hours.  Most R-rated films anymore aren't worth the assault on my soul.

So, a tip of the hat to America for a pretty reasonable Top-10 movies based upon overall sales.  Movies like those and the amazing films of yesterday that you'll find on Turner Classic Movies will be the ones that capture my imagination.

And my money.

NOTE:  A correction from a regular reader.  Apparently the f-bomb is detonated early on in Iron Man 2, the token one allowable to maintain PG-13.  Plugged-In noted that the f-bomb is "bleeped twice" during the movie in a scene where a television interview is being shown.