In the TNT version, the swords were replaced with pillows, making the scene much more comfortable for the relevant viewers.
If you ever want a quick lesson in the priorities of censoring prigs, I highly recommend watching just a few minutes of Kill Bill on TNT. We flipped it on and watched a few minutes of the movie, the scene where the Bride wakes up and kills the guy who was fixing to rape her and the orderly-cum-pimp. Needless to say, a lot was cut. The vast majority of the orderly’s speech about the rules when raping the coma victim Bride was mostly cut, leaving in the information that she was about to be raped while minimizing the violent implications of that. The rapist clambers on top of her, she bites his lip and then they cut the rest of the scene where she kills him. Then when the orderly comes back and she flashes on a memory of him saying, “I’m Buck and I like to fuck,” they changed the word “fuck” to “party”. They even went so far as to change his keychain to read “Party Wagon” instead of “Pussy Wagon”. At this point, it became clear that the movie was rendered unwatchable, so we flipped it off, wondering why you even bother to put Kill Bill on TV. I guess it’s because the movie isn’t actually a very sexualized one in most ways, but just relentless violence, so perfect for TV.
Still, the effects of the censorship left the viewer with a distinct impression as to what censors find offensive. The idea of raping a coma victim? Fine. Letting the audience in on the fact that rapists sometimes beat the crap out of their victims for the thrill of it? Unacceptable. Gruesome revenge from a victim to her rapist? Unacceptable. The word “fuck” or “pussy”? Unacceptable, and moreover, replaced with the word “party”, which took some of the threatening edge off the character. Say what you will about Kill Bill, but this scene in the uncensored version did not play around. The idea that this orderly had been collecting money allowing men to rape the Bride was deemed worthy of a gruesome revenge, nor was the men’s sleaziness downplayed. The censored version made it seem like she was mostly just trying to escape and really downplayed the horror of the rapes.
I was thinking of this while reading Brent Bozell’s whine that the NC-17 rating meant that a movie is “pornography”. Granted, Bozell’s one of the members of the Catholic League’s board of advisors, so this is as much about getting rid of the “secular” influences in Hollywood* as anything. That or he has no idea what pornography is. Actually, this being a both/and blog, I’m going to say these two things are probably both true.
The Hollywood trade publication Variety reports that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the group that makes the movie ratings, is working to “fine-tune” the ratings system. Its chairman, former Rep. Dan Glickman, “will face his biggest hurdle yet: trying to make NC-17 respectable.”
In truth, the MPAA has been trying to make pornography respectable for quite some time. In 1990, the MPAA discontinued its traditional X-rating-for-adults-only system, since the “X” had become almost exclusively associated with pornographic movies. The MPAA Website puts it this way: The letter “appeared to have taken on a surly meaning in the minds of many people, something that was never intended when the system was created.” So they changed the rating to NC-17 to avoid that “surly” stigma, even though the rating meant the same thing to moviegoers: no children under 17 allowed.
The reason that “X” became associated with pornography is that people like Bozell can’t fathom a reason to watch a movie with frank portrayals of sex in it for any other reason than to jerk off in a movie theater. The bitter irony of people like Bozell ranting against the MPAA is duly noted; the MPAA exists as a sop to censorious assholes like him who think the “secularists” put sex in movies in order to make his willie move and turn him against Jesus. But just as the Democrats need to learn that pandering to the right won’t do a damn thing to make them stop casting you as the source of all evil, so Hollywood should learn.
Here’s a list of movies that have gotten the NC-17 rating. Noteworthy is that this list doesn’t include much you could call “pornography”. Pornographers don’t submit their movies to the MPAA for a reason, which is that they aren’t exactly trying to get their movies into theaters. In fact, even more noteworthy is that most of the movies got an R rating after the producers appealed and (usually) cut one scene or part of one scene that made the censors uncomfortable. If you see the movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated, you’ll discover there’s something of a trend to what gets censored—female sexual pleasure is naughtier than male sexual pleasure, gay people are naughtier than straight people, and indie films are naughtier than big studio features.
What’s interesting is that in Bozell’s dogged attempts to be a pain in the ass of the “secular” conspiracy to give him wood, he’s managed to defeat his stated purpose of separating out movies that have a lot of violence and sex from movies that don’t. After admitting that the NC-17 rating is commercial suicide, he then rants about movies that dare try to avoid said suicide.
Which is why the NC-17 rating is not very often employed. In the last 17 years, the major studios have released only 19 movies with an NC-17 attached. (The highest-grossing one, the 1995 stripper movie “Showgirls,” was a commercial and critical flop. It was roundly denounced as trash by everyone, including former MPAA capo Jack Valenti.) It’s not so much a rating as a threat. So studios staring at the possibility of this stigma regularly edit back just enough stomach-churning violence or sexual depravity to get an R. (The original versions are then often restored on DVD as an “unrated” edition.)
My god, that’s terrible! If only there was a way to let movies with the NC-17 rating get widespread release with that rating, so both the moviemakers could see a profit and people like Bozell can know it’s Not-Porn and therefore avoid it. Then both goals—the moviemakers’ goals and the stated goals of someone like Bozell—could be met. It’s almost as if Bozell’s not actually that interested in his stated goals so much as he’s on a baseless power trip, enjoying the idea that his whining is causing those “secular” moviemakers to lose money, and doesn’t want to see that power diminished.
*For further explanation of what makes Hollywood so “secular”, get Mel Gibson drunk and ask him who runs Hollywood.
66 Responses to “If NC-17 isn’t porn, then what’s Brent Bozell been jerking off to all this time?”
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If I’m not mistaken, I saw the first NC-17 movie at the Dobie back in the day— it was highbrow porn.. er.. erotica (Henry and June).
Of course, all of the answers are contained in that Kirby Dick documentary: the most horrific violence imaginable will only get you an R (except for Re-Animator, which declined to submit to the ratings board), especially if your name is Spielberg. In other words, frank depictions of sex and nudity are out, with allowances made for box office gold (i.e. aimed at 18-49 year old males, top-dollar female celebrity gets naked).
What’s more interesting are the films that did receive the ‘X’ back in the day: from comparatively tame films like Midnight Cowboy to full-blown predecessors to Henry and June like “Last Tango in Paris.”
Unfortunately,l Amanda, your beautiful graphic has been censored by the original ISP.
Damn that MPAA!
Interesting… there are just some films that shouldn’t be watered down for TV. So much of the power in that scene, for me, is that she is nearly immobile and is facing rape (again), but is able to overpower her attacker, who is disgusting and terribly stupid.
I also just heard on NPR that the MPAA is going to make their processes more transparent (partially in response to the film ‘Not Yet Rated’) so that directors know exactly what the MPAA took issue w/ and so that there can be more uniformity in the ratings system.
It seems like censors use a key-hole set of tests to check if content is correct, not a few principles to make complete decisions. It’s easier for them to say “no slashed Achilles tendons” than “righteous violence is OK.” Then again, I didn’t see the MPAA movie.
“Interesting… there are just some films that shouldn’t be watered down for TV.”
I was really surprised that they got away with the digital alteration of “Pussy Wagon” to “Party Wagon” on the keychain and on the vehicle, honestly. I figured something like that wouldn’t be included in their broadcast contract, since it’s a much bigger intrusion on the work than pixelating or blurring an image.
They did an awesome job of the digital alteration. If only the person who did it could use her powers for good instead of evil.
Mother father chinese dentist!
I’m surprised they didn’t retitle it to Hurt Bill.
Inconvenience Bill.
Actually, I bet a part of the reason the fight for NC-17 is burbling back up from wherever its been hiding is the phasing out of movie theaters in shopping malls. Virtually all shopping malls have clauses in their leases that no “adult” material will be sold. This meant that X-rated movies were not permitted. The MPAA tried to get around this by creating the NC-17 rating, but mall theaters didn’t go for it. Now that theaters are losing business, and are largely not in shopping malls, they probably want to see if there is an audience for truly adult (not just “adult”) fare.
I’m disturbed that the word “rape” can be replaced with “party”, as if they’re the same thing.
I know the climatic scene in “Requirm for a Dream” almost got it an NC-17. While the scene does include women (being forced) to have sex with each other, it really isn’t erotic. Sure, some sick person could masturbate to it, but some sick person could masturbate to anything.
I shouldn’t be surprised if things like “party wagon” had been shot during the original filming with the specific intent of having a TV-releasable version down the road. It seems that most movies these days are actually clusters of related movies for different markets, with no principled way of saying which is the “real” version.
“I’m disturbed that the word “rapeâ€? can be replaced with “partyâ€?, as if they’re the same thing.”
If memory serves, it wasn’t. The line was originally “My name’s Buck, and I’m here to fuck.” “Fuck” got changed to “party” in the spoken line. His car, dubbed the “Pussy Wagon” had “Pussy” digitally altered to say “Party” on the keychain and the car itself.
Yeah, it’s funny, I was just reading a Der Spiegel article on how to survive in Germany that pointed out that sex shops are virtually everywhere, with no stigma attached to them, that prostitution had been legalized in 2002 and that nudity on the beaches was very much ok.
And that German women would rather have a deep conversation about politics at a bar then do the regular shitty flirting business.
It’s Brent Bozell’s worst nightmare and all from the country that Americans think is scarily conservative.
I am amazed that you decided to pan the TNT version of this over the minor things you mentioned. It was absotuely clear that the “victim” killed the rapist. You also asw he smash the “pimps” head in the door till he was dead.
They deleted any number of other violent scenes as well, including where the “heroine” cuts off the arm of one of her female enemies. They also cut out all the scenes of “spurting” blood from severed limbs. They also cut out much of the perverted and mysoginitic speech that was directed at the heroine. What are your complaints about this seemingly “fair and balanced” editing to “tone down the violence”.
Our hostess noted:
Trouble is, there’s a little matter of the law involved with this one: the f word is one of the seven dirty words that broadcasters may not use without getting in trouble with the FCC. TNT is a cablecaster, not a broadcaster (unless it goes out over some independent sattions), but the editing was probably done with eventual broadcasting in mind. It’s simply easier to do it once and get it over with.
Your point about what is and is not considered obsene is certainly valid, but I think you have to cut the editors a break on the point quoted above.
Hysterical Woman,
Here’s a fun slippery slope (my favorite argumentative fallacy!): If the decidedly un-erotic rape scene in Requiem gets a pass for being un-erotic to the average observer, then so do the dirtiest scene in “Enema Hump 29″, “Adventures in Dog Fuckery 9″, and “Rapin’ Hobos.”
Of course, Requiem has admirable artistic features above and beyond the aforementioned fictional (I hope!) examples. But, I hope that my argument is at least sufficient to show that it isn’t the lack of eroticism that gives Requiem a value that other films might lack.
The concept of a (non-premium cable) TV version of Kill Bill was kind of bizarre, but I have to say that having Pulp Fiction on TV was even worse. The latter is primarily driven by violence, but the latter, although it is violent, is probably both more sexual and more profane.
In addition, everyone who wanted to see Pulp Fiction probably already had by the time they got around to bowdlerizing it for TV. No fan would likely watch a version with, say, “Let’s not start patting each other’s backs quite yet, gentlemen” dubbed in. And nobody who was unwilling to see the original, uncut version would be likely to watch the tame version on the telly.
So I’m really suspicious of the business model here. I can’t imagine anyone actually watching an edited version of a Tarantino movie.
laughingloudly: “Victim”? “Heroine”? Why quotes? Are you trying to make a point here?
I know the climatic scene in “Requirm for a Dream� almost got it an NC-17. While the scene does include women (being forced) to have sex with each other, it really isn’t erotic. Sure, some sick person could masturbate to it, but some sick person could masturbate to anything.
It’s kinda like when some sick fuck of a congressman complained about “Schindler’s List” airing uncut on network TV because of the scene where the women are taken to the showers at Auschwitz and are terrified that they’re about to be murdered. Because, of course, you could see some of their titties, which automatically means to him that it’s a pornographic scene.
I’m sorry, but if you find that scene to be unbearably erotic, there is something fucking wrong with you, and shielding you from bare boobies is NOT going to help.
We watched “Grosse Point Blank” a while back on a U.S. station and it was just a mess from censorship so that whole scenes were removed. They changed “asshole” to “aerosol.” The most absurd was viewing “Repo Man” years ago on tv and hearing “motherfucker” turned to “melonfarmer.” I was like, what does that even mean? The films are chopped and incoherent and it makes my head hurt.
My TV censorship favorite is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Jeanie’s “Why don you go stick your thumb up your butt?” to Charlie Sheen becomes “Control yourself.” Bwahahahahahahaha. *wipes away a tear*
A nitpick here: answers.com is a mirror of Wikipedia. The article is over here; if you’re worried about someone editing it to say “HAHA COCKS” between the time you link to it and the time a user clicks it, use the “permanent link” link in the sidebar, the one that goes here at the moment.
Has anyone seen the PG-rated 300 trailer? It’s on YouTube, with candy canes shopped in for spears, My Little Pony for the wolf, and so forth. Best dialogue: “This is delicious!” “THIS… IS… CAKETOWN!!”
not really. they could have changed it to “screw” which wouldn’t have the implication that “fuck = party”.
I was thinking of Curse of the Golden Flower/(City of Golden Armor) which got an R rating in spite of one of the most disturbing scenes of mass violence I remember in a movie. Granted this is just one example of a double-standard.
Come on Amanda you know Bozell is jerking off to his own image on TV.
A Hattori Hanzo pillow! I want one. Although you’d probably kill yourself in your sleep.
This is one of the worst things of the whole mess, the double standard between sex and violence. Of course, if we admit to ourselves that violence is as bad as we treat sex, then going to war would be a whole lot more difficult, wouldn’t it?
I know this is rather trivial but I still get bent out of shape when I watch “The Last Waltz” and they blank out or cut the quote from Richard Manuel about going on the road:
“You won’t make much money but you’ll get more p*ssy than Frank Sinatra.”
TNT and the other basic/non-premium channels edit similar to broadcast so that the Bozells of the world don’t go after their advertisers. But even some of the premiun channels edit and/or mute some of the seven words. I’ve noticed it on Encore’s Western channel. The comedy “Support Your Local Sheriff” has a couple of times where the Jack Elam character and Walter Brennan’s character talk about Elam’s previous job of shoveling sh*t at the livery stable. Except they mute the word to avoid offending viewers…
i dont care what anyone says, the animated bra’s in the edited showgirls is really the only reason to watch that movie. hilarious every time.
Someone bothered editing Showgirls? Why in the hell is Veronica Mars (probably) getting cancelled if there’s a timeslot for that?!
I think you underestimate the magnitude of Bozell’s delusion. According to him, you can have a movie trilogy of epic proportions and time as Lord of the Rings, but 5 minutes of a graphic sexual nature, he assumes you only went through that 14 hours of dragon/magic fantasy to jack it to the 5 minutes of “porn.”
My fave for TV version has got to be The Blues Brothers; Namely the scene with the nun. They cut the cursing that invites the ruler beating so all you’re left with is a sadistic nun whacking the shit out of these two poor guys for no reason.
Once again, what an incredible charade ‘democracy’ has become…
Biggest laugh I got was off a description in iTunes of an album being ‘Clean Version’ and still having the swearing…
It always surprised me that the folks that looked like they needed a good fucking were the ones that were always trying to stop others from enjoying it…
Ask them: ‘If sex is so damn dirty then why did ‘God’ create it in the first place???’
The only sad point in this saga is that the ‘non-sex’ groups still actually do ‘the nasty’ so that they can fill OUR world with their automaton offspring… If they truly believed what they preached, in a few years the planet would be mercifuly free of their obtuse horse shit…
Seeing that violence rates as being better than ’sex’ and ‘naughty bits’ tells a whole lot about our current version of ‘civilized society’, don’t it…
… the most horrific violence imaginable will only get you an R (except for Re-Animator, which declined to submit to the ratings board), especially if your name is Spielberg.
Re-Animator was going to get an X rating for the rape scene in which they have a severed head perform cunnilingus. So they cut that part of the rape scene and received an “R” rating. Yeah, that makes a loooooot of sense.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is still one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen.
It’s amazing how many movies that I love are on that NC-17 list. Must be because I’m from a “secular” family, huh?
I still shake my head in amazement at the bowdlerized version of Blazing Saddles, in which “Lili von Shtupp” becomes “Lili von Shhh..”; and in her song “I’m So Tired”, the censors excise the words “…and always too soon!”
The comedy “Support Your Local Sheriff� has a couple of times where the Jack Elam character and Walter Brennan’s character talk about Elam’s previous job of shoveling sh*t at the livery stable. Except they mute the word to avoid offending viewers…
Sometimes with movies like that you’re seeing an older version of the “TV cut” and not a modern version of it, because no one’s bothered to remaster the film for cable since it was first done back in the early 1980s. In other words, you’re seeing 20-year-old censorship and not current standards.
They deleted any number of other violent scenes as well, including where the “heroine� cuts off the arm of one of her female enemies.
Oh, laughingloudly, you lying liar. I happened to flip channels just as they showed that scened on TNT last night. So shove your “oh so innocent” questions about fairness up your ass until you learn to tell the truth.
No offense intended.
In the edited version of “Out of Sight,” they changed “mother fucker” to “monkey feather,” and it completely changed the tenor of the movie, because it changed Don Cheadle from being a source of palpable threat to a source of wacky antics, especially when they cut the scene where he forces Steve Zahn to murder a drug dealer to about 4 incomprehensible seconds.
I still shake my head in amazement at the bowdlerized version of Blazing Saddles, in which “Lili von Shtupp� becomes “Lili von Shhh..�; and in her song “I’m So Tired�, the censors excise the words “…and always too soon!�
Not to mention the version I saw which cut the fart sounds during the bean eating scene. I can understand wanting to protect The Children from The Sex, but I’m pretty sure they already appreciate the humour value of a good fart joke.
Has anyone seen the PG-rated 300 trailer?
I like the “let’s put back in all the subtext that Frank Miller desperately tried to leave out” trailer, via Making Light:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi2t58CRmbU
You think that’s bad, I once spent a Saturday afternoon watching a version of Blazing Saddles that had edited by the local station showing it and all the racial epiteths were taken out and replaced by “asshole” or “jerk”. It was funny as hell - ‘cause we were stoned - but I kept thinking the whole time, “Man, someone’s seeing this movie for the first time and they’re missing one of the flick’s main points.”
On the upside, I remember watching the old edit of Blazing Saddles and the extra scenes added in for the television version. The bit where Mongo dives for “Spanish Balloons”? Awesome.
Do those creatures fuck the victim before, ‘while’ or
after they’re dead.
A comatose person is pretty close to dead.
So then they’re necrophiliacs
Quentin’s an awful person.
Don’t forget the best edited-for-tv line ever, from The Big Lebowski, when “this is what happens when you f— a stranger in the ass!” became “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!!”
Ahh censors. I miss TV in Sweden, where you could watch Reservoir Dogs, uncut, on public TV late at night (when the kiddies were in bed, the violence, you know?) The only interruption being a mid-movie weather report and commercial break.
Okay, mythago, that one definitely takes the (delicious!) cake.
Speaking of Blazing Saddles–the scene where Hedley Lamarr is flipping through a law book for a way of snatching land from its rightful owners, and comes across the heading “Land–See ‘Snatch’” was replaced with… damn it, now I don’t remember. But I hadn’t even noticed that that had been a dirty joke, since ’snatch’ had just been used to mean “take surreptitiously.”
You don’t even need Sweden. CTV, the biggest Canadian broadcast network, aired The Sopranos completely uncut at 11 Eastern, breasts, violence and all.
My favorite is still The Breakfast Club. “FLIP YOU, DAD!”
has_te:
As awful a person as Quentin Tarrantino clearly is, I thought that the scene was viciously anti-rapist. Yes, KB is ultraviolent and infradead, but as ultraviolent movies go, it’s remarkably feminist in its outlook. (Yes, I’m prepared to defend that, and yes, I understand why you could disagree with that analysis).
On Blazing Saddles: “He’s always going and coming and going and coming and HAHAHAHA!” never worked for me, either.
On Sex v. Violence, South Park: The Movie got it right: “Horrific, Deplorable Violence is Okay, as Long as People Don’t Say any Naughty Words!” That, or have sex.
My favorite for-tv movie edit is the part in The Usual Suspects, when the main characters are made to stand in the line-up and say, “Give me the keys, you fairy godmother!” instead of “…fucking cocksucker.”
Dennis: VH1 thinks that Showgirls is some sort of cult classic, right up there with Rocky Horror, and shows the “animated bra” version several times a year.
Jeff Fecke - “As awful a person as Quentin Tarrantino clearly is, I thought that the scene was viciously anti-rapist. Yes, KB is ultraviolent and infradead, but as ultraviolent movies go, it’s remarkably feminist in its outlook. (Yes, I’m prepared to defend that, and yes, I understand why you could disagree with that analysis).”
I think the same thing, and I wonder if that makes me a bad person…?
(ducking my head to avoid the thrown objects…)
Mnemosyne,
I understand your point but “Support…” is out on DVD with the dialogue intact which to me means someone in control of the masters knew where they were, so why couldn’t they get ‘em to Encore?
As far as the Blazing Saddles cuts for TV, I think I’ve seen at least five different versions depending on the channel and those the powers didn’t want to offend. Sometimes the “joint” scenes are cut, sometimes the fart, sometimes the racist language and sometimes all of the above.
The censorship that makes me scratch my head is anime in the states. why bother bringing something over here if you have to chop it all up? Most anime fans fixate on the creation of a computer program to create bikines for Tenchi Muyo (Your nose is bleeding! You naughty boy). But what they did to One Piece is just too much. They turn flinlock muskets into supersoakers, and a flintlock pistol into some kind of spring-loaded mallet, with the butt of a flintlock pistol. In the case of Gundam SEED, adding some stupid green lines to every hand gun was enough to placate the censors. Even though they are clearly shooting bullets.
I understand your point but “Support…� is out on DVD with the dialogue intact which to me means someone in control of the masters knew where they were, so why couldn’t they get ‘em to Encore?
Because Encore probably bought their version years ago when cable was still largely censored and they don’t feel like spending the money for a new version when they have a perfectly good (in their opinion) version that they can run for free anytime they want.
I read a post once where the blogger pointed out that Tarantino’s work went from pretty feminist to blatantly misogynist the more people he collaborates with. If it’s just him on script and direction, the movie will be passively or even aggressively feminist. Add Rodriguez, etc. and it all starts sliding downhill. Made sense to me—Pulp Fiction has some okay roles for women, Jackie Brown is sort of a standing fuck you to the Hollywood machine that posits that actresses are only good for playing suburban moms after 35, and Kill Bill is just awesome from the feminist point of view. It shows that you can make a female action hero that is an anti-hero, is a cool cucumber, and not have to cheat by overplaying the sentimentality about motherhood that is often invoked to excuse cool female action heroes. (Think Alien or Terminator 2.) Yes, she loses her husband and child, but it’s played almost exactly like it would be for a male character losing a wife and baby. Her femaleness is part of her experience, but it doesn’t overwhelm her individuality. Very interesting stuff, and totally passes the Mo Movie Measure with flying colors, even if the women are talking to each other to kill each other.
Dirty words are not the only things that get censored on TV. We recently rented the movie “Car Wash” from Netflix. There’s a character in it named Abdullah (played by Bill Duke), who’s a militant black nationalist. When I first saw the movie back in the late 70s (can’t remember if I ever saw it in the theater, but I know I watched it a couple of times on TV), Abdullah came off as an angry, inarticulate jerk, and not much more than that. Watching it again this time around, I was amazed at how many of the character’s lines had been cut from the TV version. In the unedited version Abdullah was still an angry young man, but a much more complex, thoughtful and ultimately sympathetic one — definitely too sympathetic for network TV at the time (and probably even now)….
It’s “This is what happens when you have fun with a stranger in the Alps!â€? if memory serves.
Sophist, having never seen the scene on TV myself, I wouldn’t swear on my life that it is “meet a stranger. ” as opposed to your version. However, I have heard that quote from several folks who have, and if I am wrong, this guy has a lot of merchandise to toss:
http://www.cafepress.com/barrysworld/2066708
And ‘Lethal Weapon’ with their overuse of the word ‘funsters’… Oh, and ‘You get FREAKED at the drive thru.’ Freaked at the drive thru? That sounds worse on many levels than getting fucked at the drive thru…
I remember watching a movie a few years back where the gun fights actually had people dying and in the ‘cooked down for teevee’ the gun fights were STILL IN THE MOVIE but the folks dying was pulled out of it… I remember commenting: “Jesus H. Christ! The real movie was much better because it showed the results of firing a gun. This shit looks like a god damned cartoon!”
Long live the Smith & Wesson…
I agree with Amanda. The Kill Bill films (which I love) permit women to be unsentimentally violent, vengeful and even possessed of “male” honor (both Elle Driver and Oren pay tribute to The Bride’s warrior superiority, even while plotting to kill her). The Bride’s metamorphsis is shown, also: She goes from a kind of fighting bimbo who drools over everything Bill says to a driven woman with a mission. In traditional loner (always male) form, she has only herself to rely on. Granted, it is her motherhood that gets her there, but that is okay. Beatrix is cool and funny and we want to like her, but we cannot (she is, after all, an assassin)–until she is humanized by the search for her child.
Uma Thurman, with her big feet, rolling eyes and marvelous humor, is what makes Beatrix something more than an action figure, just as she made the vulgar June so sexually powerful in Henry and June. Thurman represents a different kind of sexuality than the one usually sold by Hollywood–a breath of fresh air.
The most absurd was viewing “Repo Man� years ago on tv and hearing “motherfucker� turned to “melonfarmer.� I was like, what does that even mean?
Alex Cox actually scripted the ‘clean’ version, thinking if it’s going to be bowdlerised, then let it be kinda funny.
In Britain, television channels will show HBO shows and NC-17 films after the 9pm watershed: I remember watching some pretty daring ones in the early 90s, introduced by Cox himself for the ‘Moviedrome’ series. Conversely, there are stricter film ratings: the ‘12′, ‘15′ and ‘18′ age limits aren’t negotiable if you’ve got an adult in tow. The ridiculous breadth of the ‘R’ rating was best parodied in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut: in the UK, it was a ‘15′.
Seeing the Bridget Jones films on Bravo without the swearing is just wrong, too.
Diane,
“Uma Thurman, with her big feet,”
Ugh! I had TOTALLY FORGOTTEN about the review I read complaining that the movie was “ruined” by Uma’s big feet. THE MOVIE WAS RUINED. If only her mother had thought to bind those monster dogs! Christ. I wish I could remember the name of this reviewer. I hope his life is not enjoyable for him.
If seeing Uma Thurman’s real feet instead of the more acceptably-sized feet of a body-double was enough to ruin a long movie with quick pacing, a reasonable plot, and an assload of beautifully-framed shots, I’m sure his life is absolutely not enjoyable for him.
I think what’s even worse, in terms of its effect, is that Blockbuster refuses to carry NC-17 videos. Since video rentals/sales now constitute a big portion (in some cases, the majority) of a movie’s revenues, this has the ultimate chilling effect.As for TV censorship, the most absurd instance I ever saw was in “The Reivers,” a 1969 movie in which Steve McQueen says to his prostitute girlfriend, “There ain’t no point keeping a hope chest in a cathouse.” TV changed “cathouse” to “house,” which of course rendered the line meaningless. What’s interesting is that whoever decides these things had no problem with McQueen calling his partner a “nigger.”
Even more reason to love Netflix and snub Blockbuster’s attempt to steal part of the market for mailed DVD rentals: Netflix has no problems with offering up NC-17 movies, which is how I got to see This Film Is Not Yet Rated (and go on to check out one of the films it profiled the very next week).
My favorite bit of movie censoring is still Dogma. As memory serves, they cut out an entire scene. And they play this bowdlerized version on Comedy Central all the freaking time.
Of course, any time you try to put non-dirty words in a Kevin Smith movie, it just becomes sadly and unintentionally hilarious. I still can’t believe they aired Mallrats on ABC, of all places.
As for the movie ratings system… trash it. Seriously. It’s become practically meaningless anyway. How the MPAA can claim to be fair and unbiased when Casino Royale got away with a PG-13 despite a fairly strong scene involving nudity and torture is beyond me.
Oh, wait… it was happening to a man. *eyeroll* Double standard much?