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Good Time “Fockers” is Pronounced a Success by Mike Snider and Cesar Soriano (USA Today)
Posted by Ed and Lois
What’s in a name? If the name is Focker, it means that a movie based on a takeoff of the F-word becomes the family hit of Christmas weekend.
Meet the Fockers, the sequel to 2000’s hit Meet the Parents, set a record for Christmas Day, $19 million, and eventually took in $46.1 million to be the No. 1 movie of the weekend.
And Fockers focuses even more than Meet the Parents on plays on the family name, with characters named Dom and Orney Focker (pronounced “fawker”). How did the moviemakers get away with the joke and keep a PG-13 rating?
After it submitted Meet the Parents, Universal Studios was asked by the ratings board whether it had made up the name Focker. In response, the studio submitted a list of real people named Focker. That film earned a PG-13 rating, and the studio aimed for the same rating for this one. Meet the Fockers is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language and a brief drug reference.
Christine Rodriguez of Miami watched Fockers with her two teens, Emmanuel, 13, and Jose, 18. She says the F-word humor “was innocent. (But) I felt uncomfortable with quite a few of the sexual references. Throughout the movie, I kept asking, ‘What is this rated?’ I thought it was PG-13, but it felt like I was watching a rated-R movie.”
Nell Minow, editor of MovieMom .com, warns, “Parents should know that there is a lot of R-level humor in this movie,” citing the film’s graphic sex talk.