Which brings me to a new family-friendly device that tries to put movies back towards "beautiful, lovely or praise worthy:" the ClearPlay DVD player. In case you haven't read the little blurb in the upper right Simply put, ClearPlay is a DVD player that enables your family to enjoy all of the great Hollywood movies you’ve always wanted to watch—without all of the junk you don’t want. The DVD player has been programmed to skip points in the movie that contain inappropriate scenes or mute inappropriate dialogue - so you don't have to hover your finger over the fast forward and mute buttons.
After watching many movies on my ClearPlay DVD player I will never go back to watching movies without ClearPlay, if I can help it. Also, for many R-rated movies I've watched, ClearPlay has cleaned them up to be worthy of a PG-13 rating. ClearPlay has also done a very good job toning down a lot of PG-13 movies so I don't need to feel that a 13 year old would need to be 16 before being mature enough to watch some movies.
In my home if a PG-13 movie has content I don't want a 16 year old to watch I'll deem it R, Restricted - as the single letter acronym stands for. That being said, because the members of the MPAA rating panel are human too we should always remember that what the panel members slap on a movie isn't "movie rating gospel." As a parent I still dictate what is appropriate and what isn't. As for myself, I've even had a few people question me as to why - as an adult - I'd need something like this, and frankly I care about making sure I see movies without profanity and sex and all around a lack of inappropriate content.
One caveat about ClearPlay is that it can't change the overall tone of any movie. For example - I won't watch Brokeback Mountain, because it's about 2 gay men. Even without anything sexually related I still don't want to watch a movie about the relationship between 2 gay men. Nor can it remove the hate-fueled revenge between the 2 leading characters in Lakeview Terrace. It will remove the profanity and violent acts, but not remove the overall tone of animosity between the 2 characters.
When suggesting to a friend of mine - that has a ClearPlay DVD player - that she should watch R-rated "The Rock" on ClearPlay (it's an Alcatraz movie that I found to be very entertaining and void of anything close to being rated R, when viewed via ClearPlay), she said "Oh, I haven't come to the point where I'll watch R's on a ClearPlay DVD player." I then asked this person if they'd watch the "made for TV" version and she said "probably." Then I asked her what the difference was between the TV version that had content removed, versus the ClearPlay version that has virtually the same content removed. Needless to say, questioning her logic left her making excuses as to why an R that was cleaned up for TV was acceptable to watch and the ClearPlay version was not.
I find it interesting that there is a security blanket in a cleaned-up-for-TV version that this person didn't find when considering watching the same movie on ClearPlay. I guess there is safety in familiarity. How about yourself, assuming you have an aversion to R-rated movies, how quick would you be to watch a TV version of "Back Draft" or "The Matrix" instead of the version on ClearPlay? After all skipped content is still skipped content.
I hope no one assumes I'm saying that ClearPlay makes every movie in the G - R spectrum acceptable to watch, I'm simply saying that for the most part ClearPlay does an excellent job of cleaning up of the inappropriate content in a movie and can enhance your DVD watching experiences, but remember that if something has an overall tone that is disagreeable, ClearPlay can't cleanup the tone. It can't make the 2 lovers in Brokeback Mountain heterosexual.
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