Author Topic: Bully  (Read 19474 times)

Offline Mandy21

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Re: Bully
« Reply #30 on: April 02, 2012, 03:52:13 pm »
Got an email this morning from the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services (I'm on their mailing list):

HHS and the Department of Education have unveiled an enhanced StopBullying.gov.

The site encourages children, parents, educators, and communities to take action to prevent and respond to bullying.

Visit StopBullying.gov now
.

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Offline Mandy21

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Re: Bully
« Reply #31 on: April 02, 2012, 03:58:42 pm »

  If I got my statistics correct.  Bully was in third place this weekend.  After The Hunger Games, and Clash of the Titans.  That is pretty good.

"Bully" pushes its way to $23K per-screen opening

By Joshua L. Weinstein | Reuters – 21 hrs ago.........LOS ANGELES, April 1 (TheWrap.com) -

"Bully," the Weinstein Co. documentary that sparked controversy after the MPAA rated it R -- and refused to change the rating even after nearly a half-million people signed a petition asking for the movie to be rated PG-13 -- opened to a remarkable $115,000 at five locations over the weekend.

That works out to $23,000 per location -- the strongest opening of any documentary in 2012.

The Weinstein Co. released the movie without a rating, rather than with the R that the MPAA gave it. Even as an unrated movie, it generated significant interest.

"We're going to expand April 13 into the top 50 markets -- at least 100 theaters, maybe more," Erik Lomis, the Weinstein Co.'s head of distribution, told TheWrap Sunday. "We're going to focus on a lot of group sales -- we got calls from churches and school groups and the Boy Scouts. You name the groups, we've got them all over the country calling us and requesting information."

He also acknowledged that the company remains in talks with the MPAA.

"We're always in contact with the MPAA," he said.

Lomis said that the Weinstein Co.'s lawyer for this matter is David Boies, one of two attorneys who argued the case that successfully overturned California's Proposition 8, which would have banned gay marriage.

Lomis said that "Bully" "is a hard watch, but it's a very moving film -- and we only had 10 percent of the audience under 18. Maybe that was because of the ratings issue, I don't know, but it leads me to be very optimistic about the potential of this film."

He said he is especially optimistic because exit polls showed that the movie played best among teens.

Dawn is coming,
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Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Re: Bully
« Reply #32 on: April 02, 2012, 04:10:46 pm »

  If I got my statistics correct.  Bully was in third place this weekend.  After The Hunger Games, and Clash of the Titans.  That is pretty good.

That is amazing for a documentary.
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Offline Sheriff Roland

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Re: Bully
« Reply #33 on: April 04, 2012, 07:02:25 pm »
Bully had it's Canadian premiere at the new Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) buiding called Light Box earlier this week. It will be released nationally 'in selected cities' on Friday with a PG rating.

Director says move by Canuck censors pushed U.S. theatres to show 'Bully'

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/movies/director-says-move-by-canuck-censors-pushed-us-theatres-to-show-bully-146137565.html

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Offline Mandy21

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Re: Bully
« Reply #34 on: April 06, 2012, 10:14:14 am »
The director considers this a victory?  Seriously?  Thousands and thousands of people had to get involved, and in the end, those very few F-bombs were cut anyway.  That doesn't sound like victory to me.  Why didn't he just cut them to begin with, and not waste people's time?  Publicity stunt anyone?
~~~
Weinstein Co. cuts 'Bully' F-words for PG-13 rating
April 5, 2012, 7:46 PM EST
By Tim Kenneally
TheWrap

The Weinstein Co. has backed down on "Bully," cutting F-words from the documentary to get a teen-friendly PG-13 rating ahead of its April 13 expansion into 55 markets.

The MPAA originally gave the documentary an R rating for language, holding firm despite a grass-roots campaign for a PG-13 rating. After the campaign by Weinstein co-chair Harvey Weinstein, various celebrities and online petitioners failed to sway the MPAA, the company decided to release the movie unrated instead.

At a point in time when bullying in America has reached epidemic proportions, Emmy-winning director Lee Hirsch invites viewers to spend a year in the lives of five students who contend with public torment and humiliation on a daily basis.

The film premiered last week.

The unrated release posed a challenge for theaters chains: one opting not to screen the film at all, two others treating it as if it were rated R, and the AMC theater chain allowing viewers under 17 to see the movie unaccompanied if they brought a permission slip.

"Bully" director Lee Hirsch said he felt "completely vindicated" by the new rating. "While I retain my belief that PG-13 has always been the appropriate rating for this film, as reinforced by Canada's rating of a PG, we have today scored a victory from the MPAA." 

The new rating will also allow various schools, organizations, including the National Education Association and the Cincinnati School District, to screen the film for children as they had hoped.

The new rating came with "great support" from MPAA chairman Chris Dodd, the Weinstein Co. said in a statement. During a screening in Washington prior to the documentary's release, Dodd suggested trimming a few of the curse words to get the lower PG-13 rating.


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Offline milomorris

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Re: Bully
« Reply #35 on: April 06, 2012, 11:52:03 am »
  The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Offline David In Indy

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Re: Bully
« Reply #36 on: April 06, 2012, 03:12:38 pm »
The director considers this a victory?  Seriously?  Thousands and thousands of people had to get involved, and in the end, those very few F-bombs were cut anyway.  That doesn't sound like victory to me.  Why didn't he just cut them to begin with, and not waste people's time?  Publicity stunt anyone?
~~~
Weinstein Co. cuts 'Bully' F-words for PG-13 rating
April 5, 2012, 7:46 PM EST
By Tim Kenneally
TheWrap

The Weinstein Co. has backed down on "Bully," cutting F-words from the documentary to get a teen-friendly PG-13 rating ahead of its April 13 expansion into 55 markets.

The MPAA originally gave the documentary an R rating for language, holding firm despite a grass-roots campaign for a PG-13 rating. After the campaign by Weinstein co-chair Harvey Weinstein, various celebrities and online petitioners failed to sway the MPAA, the company decided to release the movie unrated instead.

At a point in time when bullying in America has reached epidemic proportions, Emmy-winning director Lee Hirsch invites viewers to spend a year in the lives of five students who contend with public torment and humiliation on a daily basis.

The film premiered last week.

The unrated release posed a challenge for theaters chains: one opting not to screen the film at all, two others treating it as if it were rated R, and the AMC theater chain allowing viewers under 17 to see the movie unaccompanied if they brought a permission slip.

"Bully" director Lee Hirsch said he felt "completely vindicated" by the new rating. "While I retain my belief that PG-13 has always been the appropriate rating for this film, as reinforced by Canada's rating of a PG, we have today scored a victory from the MPAA."  

The new rating will also allow various schools, organizations, including the National Education Association and the Cincinnati School District, to screen the film for children as they had hoped.

The new rating came with "great support" from MPAA chairman Chris Dodd, the Weinstein Co. said in a statement. During a screening in Washington prior to the documentary's release, Dodd suggested trimming a few of the curse words to get the lower PG-13 rating.





This is very disappointing to me. Since when does cussing deserve an R rating? I've heard plenty of cussing (including the F bomb) in PG-13 movies. So why the R rating to begin with? It doesn't make sense. Not to mention these kids hear plenty of those words in school each day, they hear them on TV (HBO anyone?) and they probably hear their own parents utter them at home at least on a semi regular basis. Hell, I heard my own father drop the F bomb when I was a little kid back in the 1960s. This sort of thing is not at all uncommon.

So what's the deal? ???

Removing those words only serves to eliminate some of the impact from the bullying incidents. It almost seems as if they (the MPAA) wanted to eliminate the impact as if to say "See? This bullying problem really isn't as bad as it seems."

If they want to make a movie about bullying, they need to SHOW it! ALL of it!
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Bully
« Reply #37 on: April 07, 2012, 12:49:09 am »




If they want to make a movie about bullying, they need to SHOW it! ALL of it!




I agree, David.





http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2012/04/02/120402crci_cinema_denby?currentPage=all

The Current Cinema
Kids at Risk
by David Denby
April 2, 2012



Is bullying on the rise? The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children claims that a hundred and sixty thousand kids stay home from school each day out of fear, but hard numbers that would identify a trend are difficult to come by. The National Center for Education Statistics has documented a rapid rise in recent years in the number of reported incidents of bullying, but that may reflect an increase in reporting rather than in actual incidents. We can’t measure the current rancor against the bullying of fifty or a hundred years ago, and the causes are difficult to pinpoint. Yet many people feel that kid-on-kid malevolence has become a kind of epidemic, given the prevalence of cyber-bullying and, in particular, the unnerving stories of teen-age suicides that have dominated the headlines in recent months.

Lee Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen, the filmmakers who made the moving documentary “Bully,” don’t try to answer any questions. They avoid charts and graphs, talking heads and sociology. Their approach is more direct and, perhaps, more effective. They chose as their subjects five youths from different parts of the country. As the movie begins, two of them are dead. Tyler Long, of Murray County, Georgia, hanged himself in 2009, when he was seventeen; Ty Smalley, who lived outside Oklahoma City, shot himself in 2010, when he was eleven. The boys’ presence, mostly in old home videos, haunts the film. Both had been persistently bullied. We hear about what happened—physical intimidation, some of it severe—from their inconsolable parents, but why the boys were targeted remains a mystery. Hirsch and Lowen, hoping to celebrate their subjects, have rightly created a lyrical work. They film the other kids at home, at school, and at leisure, as they wander in the woods or around railroad yards. At times, the movie becomes a wistful idyll of rural American childhood under threat. Violence hangs in the air.

One of the subjects is Alex Libby, a twelve-year-old seventh grader at East Middle School, in Sioux City, Iowa. Alex was born prematurely, and he has a slightly curved and flattened upper lip. He’ll be considered cool-looking when he’s older (an American Belmondo), but he doesn’t know that yet, and he has been bullied for his appearance since grade school. The filmmakers embedded themselves at East Middle School for a year, and filmed many children, so as to disguise their real purpose, which was to see how Alex copes with his predicament. He mostly takes it in silence, because he wants to maintain the fiction that his tormentors are his friends. His father tells him to stand up for himself, but some kids are not fighters. Sitting in the back of a school bus, the filmmakers, using a Canon 5D Mark II, which looks like a still camera, managed to shoot a rubbery little heavyweight beating Alex.

Hirsch and Lowen took the footage to Alex’s parents, and they went, enraged, to the school administrators, who had also watched it. The Libbys come across as loving and alert, as do the parents of the two other kids in the film—Ja’Meya Jackson, a fourteen-year-old African-American girl in rural Mississippi, and Kelby Johnson, in Tuttle, Oklahoma, who is sixteen years old and openly gay. Ja’Meya’s mother fights for her daughter in the criminal-justice system after Ja’Meya, tired of being called stupid, waved a loaded revolver at kids on her school bus. Kelby’s father says that, once his daughter came out, the kids at her school turned on her, and the town began shunning the entire family. Kelby, it becomes clear, doesn’t want to pick up and go elsewhere—though she has cuts on her wrist, she’s jolly and combative—and her father supports her decision. The school administrators we see, however, cannot be described as alert. (At East Middle School, the vice-principal assures the Libbys that the students on the bus are as “good as gold.”) Their attitude is one variant or another on “Kids will be kids.” Managing huge public institutions, they don’t know how to change the culture they work in.

“Bully” has powerful friends: the Weinstein Company is distributing it, and celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Justin Bieber, and Meryl Streep have been talking it up and appearing at screenings. But only a change in popular culture can seriously affect attitudes, and, at the moment, that change is being impeded by an improbable enemy—the Motion Picture Association of America. The M.P.A.A.’s rating board counted six “f”-words in the film and gave it an R rating, a decision that has effectively destroyed the possibility that the picture will do any good. Most public schools are not going to sponsor screenings of an R-rated film, no matter how high-minded, and somehow I can’t see bullies demanding that their parents take them to the mall to see “Bully.”

Chris Dodd, the former Connecticut senator who is now the head of the M.P.A.A., has said, “If we change the ruling in this case, I’ll have ten other filmmakers lined up saying they shouldn’t be given the R. And who are we to say why this film should be different than the others?” For starters, the M.P.A.A. could consider the context in which profanity is used. In “Bully,” the most virulent use of it is by a boy who threatens Alex Libby in a particularly obscene way. That child uses the word to frighten and to punish. The rest of the language is just color and punctuation, like most profanity, and few middle schoolers today are likely to be wounded by it.

Katy Butler, a seventeen-year-old high-school junior in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had a finger broken by kids when she was in middle school, began an online petition drive to fight the M.P.A.A.’s rating, which, so far, has more than four hundred thousand signatures. Kids may understand better than their elders what actually threatens them. ♦

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Offline Mandy21

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Re: Bully
« Reply #38 on: April 07, 2012, 07:54:37 am »
Rather long, but interesting, article, off Huffington Post this morning.
~~~


Mark O'Connell, L.C.S.W.Psychotherapist in private practice
 
Over the past two years, a national conversation has developed around bullying. A critical aspect of this conversation is the growing perception of bullying as a real and dangerous threat, as opposed to a normal phase of youth development. At the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention last March, President Obama expressly rejected the idea of bullying as "just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up." While the president should be saluted for his general leadership and this specific observation, another aspect of the conference gave me pause, namely the president's attempt to universalize bully-victimhood, as if each young person is equally vulnerable in this regard. Using his famed charisma, Obama reassured the audience that even he had been teased as a child for his big ears. This moment encapsulates a danger that the conference and the broader conversation on bullying both face: losing sight of the rash of teen suicides, mostly by males who identified as or were perceived to be gay, that originally catapulted the issue of bullying into the national spotlight.

A similar universalization took place last October, at a CNN-sponsored special at Rutgers University entitled "Bullying: It Stops Here." In his opening remarks, Anderson Cooper acknowledged the recent suicide of gay 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, almost a year to the day after the death of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi, who was also gay. Following these remarks, gay teen suicide was never addressed as a distinct or revealing symptom of the problem of bullying, and the program instead focused on bullying as a broad concept, including a Dr. Phil segment on how bullies are victims, too. One illuminating exchange between Cooper and a black high school student offered a chance to reinscribe the particular within the universal: the student explained that his teachers would be more likely to protect him if someone called him "the n-word" than if the same person called him "faggot" or any other anti-gay term. This was not expanded upon.

People can easily agree that bullying for any reason (e.g., race or ethnicity, physical or mental disability, real or perceived sexual orientation) is harmful and wrong. But in the well-intentioned effort to address bullying as a broad concept, specific insights may be lost that can help us understand commonalities behind many forms of bullying and the connection between bullying behavior and our broader culture. The double-digit string of gay teen suicides that launched this national conversation indicate that certain youths are more vulnerable than others to bullying -- or, in other words, there is a real hierarchy to bullying that remains a large, tense, pink elephant in the room. Refocusing for a moment upon these suicides helps to reveal the deeply ingrained ways in which our cultural expectations of what boys and girls are -- and how they should act -- informs every aspect of the bullying problem.

Our culture is ruled by the gender binary, a system to which we all contribute in order to delineate between female and male. While open to contestation, this system frequently preserves a sense of masculinity/power for men, and prescribes one of femininity/submission for women, ultimately securing male dominance. The effects of such a system can be felt beyond the literal image of what a man or woman is; more generally, in a misogynistic culture, every identifiable difference between people is filtered through a misogynistic lens. Indeed, every characteristic for which youth tend to be bullied has been studied in terms of its being "feminized." A quick Google search reveals studies on the "Feminizing of African Americans," the "Feminizing of Asians," of Southeast Asians, of Native Americans, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, the overweight, and so on. Given these realities, it also holds that a particular group -- or perceived member of a group -- will be more vulnerable to bullying and abuse to the degree that such a group is not supposed to be feminine. This may help to explain why effeminate or gender-nonconforming male youth (i.e., those who are perceived to be gay) are in such regular and tremendous jeopardy, symbolizing as they do a loss of male power and privilege. We may also expect that other targets of bullying singled out for entirely different characteristics may be referred to by terms reserved for effeminate or perceived gay males, because such males are at the very bottom of the cultural barrel.

Lee Hirsch's just-released documentary Bully is an evocative depiction of how the gender binary impacts acts of aggression. The subjects -- several kids facing repeated bullying in school, as well as the families of two boys who committed suicide -- are all seen through a misogynistic lens. The boys are constantly called "bitch" and "pussy," while school administrators try to explain away the harassment, noting that "boys will be boys" and encouraging the youths (at least the boys) to resolve their "differences" with a "manly" handshake. Similarly, though none of the subjects are out, self-identified gay males, the word "faggot" is uttered throughout the film more than any other derogatory term, and in one scene a 12-year-old boy named Alex is threatened on the bus by a peer who says, "I'll shove a broomstick up your ass." According to The Los Angeles Times, this explicitly homophobic scene was the lynchpin in the ratings controversy surrounding the film and was almost cut in order to change the MPAA rating from R to PG-13 -- still another example of the "gay" aspect of this epidemic at risk of being minimized or erased. The two female subjects are featured less in the documentary, and though we do not learn much about them, it is made clear that one of them has deviated from gender and sexual norms, having come out at her school as a lesbian.

The insidiousness of the misogynistic lens even affects how the parents of the children in the film view them. When Alex tells his father how his peers have been treating him, his father's knee-jerk reaction is to suggest that Alex has failed to protect himself and thereby failed to protect his sister, who will be attending middle school the following year. The reaction is clearly borne of love, fear, confusion, and desperation, but it shows just how deeply embedded the gender binary is in our minds, and how we perpetuate it (and its damaging effects) even with the best of intentions. Alex's father unwittingly establishes role expectations for Alex and his sister -- male vs. female, hero vs. victim -- thereby failing to empathize with or validate Alex's experience of victimhood, and instead exacerbating his feeling that he is less than normal.

We may be blind to the misogynistic gender binary in our own country by proximity. Perhaps it is easier to recognize it, and the brutality it inspires, by looking across the globe to the gruesome murders of "emo" youth in Iraq. "Emo," short for "emotional," is an identity adopted from the West, in which tight clothes, piercings, and spiked hair are flaunted as chosen emblems of vulnerability. Since last year over a hundred emo youth, mostly females and gay males, have been stoned to death in Iraq, and the killing hasn't stopped. Scott Long of The Guardian reports, "It's all about boys showing vulnerability in unmanly ways, girls flashing an unfeminine and edgy attitude," and it's causing a "moral panic" in Iraq. The idea of teenagers being massacred for presenting vulnerability and conveying gender-nonconforming expression sounds horrific, but how truly different is it from the bullying currently taking place in our own American communities?

The gender binary and its relationship to bullying may be an elusive and challenging concept for many, because it requires us to self-reflect, examine our own expectations, and perhaps even change some of them. No one wants to feel he or she is part of the problem. But we are, all of us. An awareness of the systems through which we live and perceive the world, and which we maintain everyday, is essential for healing and change to take place.

Part of the solution lies in changing our expectations for how males and females "should" behave, particularly males. We can take a page from the fathers in Bully, all of whom have been forced to walk in the shoes of their victimized, "feminized" children, all of whom now allow themselves to be emotional, to cry, and to take action against this problem. We cannot wait for more young people (and their families) to be destroyed before we too make the necessary adjustments in our expectations of what is "male" and what is "female."

Dawn is coming,
Open your eyes...

Offline serious crayons

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Re: Bully
« Reply #39 on: April 07, 2012, 12:11:03 pm »
Interesting piece! It IS long, but well worth reading. Thanks for posting it, Mandy.