Clearplay and “The Blind Side”

I wanted to recommend a movie for the Thanksgiving season, but before I do that, I have to tell you about Clearplay. Clearplay is a DVD player and a filter subscription service that lets you watch regular DVDs censored according to your preferences. Originally, I was skeptical about using such a service since I figured if a movie needed to be censored, it probably didn’t belong in our home.  But I have found that I would have little to watch at all if I ruled out any movie that had a speck of profanity. And that is what I’ve enjoyed with Clearplay–movies without flinching at expletives, or keeping my hand on the remote in case there is an inappropriate scene (and of course, it would be a little late by the time I did anything about it).

I tend to be a bit more conservative than most when it comes to what movies I consider appropriate for my family, so I appreciate that Clearplay allows you to choose the setting (high, low, medium) for each category being filtered (profanity, sexuality, substance abuse, violence, etc.) and it tells you what that means.  You can adjust the setting at any time, so you could, for example, preview a movie and then decide to change the setting when you have your children watch it.  Or you could change the setting in the middle of the movie.

I am aware that I still need to remind myself and my teenagers that even though we may have watched a movie at home, that doesn’t mean that the same movie is acceptable to watch at a friend’s house. (Though this actually hasn’t been much of an issue at all–life is apparently too busy to hang out with friends watching movies anyway.) And we need to qualify our recommendations, since we don’t want anyone to watch something offensive just because we said it was a great movie, forgetting that we watched it edited.

Which is why I had to tell you about Clearplay before I recommended a movie we watched with our teenagers recently.  You have probably already heard about it: The Blind Side.  I found this movie, based on a true story, particularly appropriate for the Thanksgiving season as it not only includes Thanksgiving in the story, but it is a good reminder of some of the blessings we enjoy–family, education, shelter, food, friends.And I am also thankful that as I watched it with my boys, we could learn to sympathize with some of the harder elements of this world without bringing violence or profanity into our home.