Censorship

[Drac]

RANT: Is anybody as sick of this as I am..AMC was showing Smokey and the Bandit not to long ago..There wasn't a lot of swearing in it, mostly Jackie Gleasons "'I'm gonna barbacue your ***" or "Where you at you sumbetch" and NOTHING was heard..Last night A and E showed Forrest Gump and what few words where covered up...Now I don't condone a non-stop barrage of cuss words, but we grew up on movies that had minimal swear words and we turned out all right..Just wonderng if anyone one else is fed up with the Moral Majority telling us whats bad for us...END RANT

 

[michaeledward]

The Moral Majority has nothing to do with this. That was a specific right wing group that fell into disfavor in the mid 80's. Mr. Falwell attempted to revive the Moral Majority under the name Moral Majority Coalition a few years back. I think with little success. Mr. Falwell has since died, leaving the organization without a figurehead.

As AMC is a cable television program, the FCC has nothing to do with regulating the content, and demanding altering movies for content.

If the pendulum has swung too far for you, look to those who are choosing to swing the pendulum. The attacks on Janet Jackson and Howard Stern, et al, have driven television companies to be conservative in their programming.

Reap - Sow. You know how it goes.

 

[MA-Caver]

This is one of the reasons why I dislike commercialized television. Watching Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider" and there was a scene where one of the gold-panners getting shot multiple times by a bad Marshall and his deputies including a final shot to the forehead. Likewise Eastwood fighting Richard (7'2") Kile <sic> and the impact(s) were totally edited out. You heard them and saw the reactions of the other gold-panners but that's all.
Same with the swearing et al. Where the words are overdubbed (not too shabby by the way) with the poltically correct word such as F--- being edited to Fricken or flippen.
Hence I'd rather get/rent the DVD and watch the movie as it was intended to be. If I don't like something I'm not going to watch it. If I'm offended by the movie's content (language or otherwise) I won't watch it. It's that simple.
Not to mention how many hours my life's precious energies are sapped away by what feels like 20 minutes of commercials to every 5 minutes of movie/program.
What's the point of watching? All commercials do is try to feed off your (inner) sense of inadequacy by telling you "...you're no good/not good enough unless you buy... THIS!"

Arrrggghhh!

 

[tellner]

It's interesting to note that one small group of "Christians" (I hesitate to lump the true followers if Isa bin Maryam [pbuh] in with these twits) is responsible for something over 90% of indecency complaints to the FCC.

 

[Brian R. VanCise]

Hey Drac I am with you in that I do get tired of all the censorship.

 

[Andy Moynihan]

This is one of the reasons why I dislike commercialized television. Watching Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider" and there was a scene where one of the gold-panners getting shot multiple times by a bad Marshall and his deputies including a final shot to the forehead. Likewise Eastwood fighting Richard (7'2") Kile <sic> and the impact(s) were totally edited out. You heard them and saw the reactions of the other gold-panners but that's all.
Same with the swearing et al. Where the words are overdubbed (not too shabby by the way) with the poltically correct word such as F--- being edited to Fricken or flippen.

"We train young men to drop flaming gasoline on people....and yet their commanders will not allow them to write...(Sudden substitution totally not even Marlon Brando's voice or volume) .."FILTH!".....on their airplanes because.....it's obscene....."

Gag me with a Claymore mine.

 

[Jai]

This is why I do not watch TV, or even listen to the radio anymore. You hear a great song on the radio, next week the song is a minute less and half the words are missing, and 90% of them aren't even that bad. I'd rather pay 19.99 for a movie and watch it with all it's content rather then the chopped up happy fluffy version on cable.

 

[Gordon Nore]

I remember as a kid, sitting down with my parents, probably late sixties or early seventies, to watch the film To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck. This was in the days that it took years for a feature film to find it's way onto television screens.

In one of the many powerful scenes of the film, Gregory Peck's character is confronted by one of a number of whites who are angry with his choice to defend a "Negro" accused of the rape of a white girl.

Bob Ewell: You n i g g e r lover.
Atticus Finch: [to Jem] No need to be afraid of him, son. He's all bluff.
[after they get home]
Atticus Finch: There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.

{Apologies for circumventing the cuss filter.}

Bob Ewell spits in Atticus Finch's face as he drops the "N" bomb.

Years later, before video stores, I watched the movie again on the late show. The "N" bomb is muted out of the film, and, along with it, a profound message of hatred vs tolerance. Every time I've seen this film since, it has been altered in the same fashion.

Who benefits from this?

 

[Drac]

I recently saw Disneys "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" on one of those PC channels..They dubbed over the cuss words in Galic that are shouted at Darby when he was in the Farie Mountain...They rant and rave about movie preservation YET feel free to tamper with them...Sad..

 

[michaeledward]

The LA Times has an article today about the coursening of language on broadcast television over the past several years.

http://www.latimes.com/la-ca-language14oct14,0,1105711.story?coll=la-home-center


Personally, I am less offended by language, or its modification, than the content (or even the premise) that is provided on most programs today.

 

[Sukerkin]

Censorship is ever a sensitive issue and one that generally promotes very different reactions from different people.

I do actually object to an over use of any of the normal censorship targets in any entertainment or art media. Partly this is down to the way I was brought up - if I swear then you know things are going out the window pretty quickly !

However, the other part of my objection is that too much dependance on sex, violence and swearing rather than using any actual creativity is corrosive to the art form. This is particularly evident when the censorship razor begins to be wielded. If a film ceases to be entertaining with all the 'naughty' bits taken out then that's a good case for a low estimation of the films quality in the first place.

One of the major roles of art, beyond simple entertainment, is to analyse ourselves and our behaviour and it forms a feedback loop which can either be positive or negative. These days we get very little that is positive in films or music and a great deal that is negative - I doubt that Shane would be made these days.

The boundaries of what is 'decent' get pushed further and further away at an ever faster rate. People, especially the young (who do get to see this stuff whatever the law says) are affected by what they see and hear and I firmly believe that the degraded media of the present has a part to play in the plummeting standards of behaviour that we witness.

Given that art is a reflection of the human condition, for it to ignore the fact that violence, sex and profanity are part of it would also be a degradation of the form and it's purpose. It has to be said too, that sterile, anodyne and saccarine 'art' serves noone well. The art lies in being able to render such subjects in a fashion that speaks the 'message' to the widest audience.

For example, I found the constant barrage of swearing and brutality in 'Reservoir Dogs' to be so offensive that I've never been able to tolerate watching the film the whole way through. Did the film portray the characters as intended? Probably. Was it the film makers intention to so offend a viewer that they wont watch his creation? I would guess not (tho' you can never be sure).

Yet I found Apocolypse Now, hardly a tranquil film, to be a brilliant vehicle in telling it's messages of the nature of people in extreme situations and the futility of war as a means of settling national disputes.

If I were to be a Censor, then I suspect that I would be a bad one, except perhaps for the fact that I would push for the non-censorship of some art because to censor it would be to destroy it. In those cases I would be advising control of where and when it is shown.

If something has to be censored to be 'family friendly' then quite obviously it is not for family viewing and trying to adjust it to suit can make things quite humerous. The example that comes to my mind when I think of this is the 'for TV' word overdubbing talked about above - '"Forget you, melon farmer!" and "Yippeekiyay, Kimusabi" (sp) are golden classics from an early evening broadcast of Die Hard . Removing the punchy expletives in that fashion just shattered the suspension-of-disbelief illusion necessary to enjoy a film properly.

Anyhow, rambling on and my rumbling tum tells me it's time for dinner so I'll zip up.