2009 documentary
Rating: 11/20
Plot: Mormons don’t like curse words or naked people and aren’t supposed to watch R-rated movies. Some entrepreneurs in Utah decide to ignore the little FBI warning at the beginning of movies and edit them for content in order to rent out PG versions to the public.
First, there is a Philip Seymour Hoffman appearance as Brandt from Lebowski, the scene where Jeff Bridges meets Bunny for the first time. It was one of the many clips they showed in original and altered versions to show just how incoherent these people made these movies. They mentioned a couple movies (Brokeback Mountain being one) that were impossible for them to edit. I’m surprised that Lebowski wasn’t one of them. The film had to end up being about thirty-five minutes after the took out all the objectionable material, right? I also saw a copy of Face/Off in the video store a couple times and wondered if they left Nicolas Cage’s line about how he could eat a peach for hours in there or if they took that out. I was reminded of Cinema Paradiso, a movie they did end up showing a clip of, with this whole thing, and it was a little disturbing. With the priest in that movie, he was doing it for reasons you could call noble. The people who run these businesses–the titular original and the numerous copycats–seem to be in it for the money. Of course, I might only think that because of the obvious bias of the documentarians. This had the reek of subjectivity all over it, and along with that, the music and montage (mostly meaningless shots of the video store walls) brought this to amateurish levels. I was also a little annoyed because I felt like the directors Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi were tricking the audience with a big reveal about Danny Thompson, the guy they focused on the most in this. Maybe “tricking” isn’t the way to describe what’s going on, but it definitely seemed like they were taking some delight in what happened. Or maybe I misread the whole thing. There’s one emotional scene that cracked me up where poor Thompson details his psycho-sexual evaluation in which a device was attached to his penis while they played stories about a variety of sexual conducts and measured how aroused he became. It was fitting, I guess, that scenes from A Clockwork Orange were intercut with that. You also get to hear Dan Rather make some terrible puns and hear a guy say, “Maybe I’d be attracted to tables.” But no, I didn’t like this.
It did remind me that I haven’t seen Cinema Paradiso in a really long time.
