Day: September 24, 2004

Former Minnesota governor says he won't vote in presidential election. Jesse Ventura says he'll take a pass on the voting booth in November.

The former governor of Minnesota told an audience at the University of Illinois in Urbana Wednesday that he won't vote in the presidential election because he doesn't like Democrat John Kerry or President George W. Bush. “Look at the position I'm in,'' said Ventura, who served as Minnesota governor from 1999-2003. “If I vote for John Kerry, I'm going to get my taxes raised.''

Bush won't get his vote because of the president's positions on social issues, including his opposition to gay marriage and stem-cell research, Ventura said. “It scares me when a president says he won't support stem-cell research because it goes against God,'' Ventura said. “I have news for you. If you're waiting for God to cure Alzheimer's, then we are going to be waiting a long time.''

Ya. Don't exercise your right to vote. That'll show 'em.

You nimrod.

Ruined by R ratings
John Patterson
Friday September 24, 2004

The Guardian

I had me a Proustian moment at the used-video store this week. I stumbled on a copy of the first movie I ever saw that had been blatantly and brutally cut. It was called Last Summer and I saw it late at night in maybe 1980, on the old Metromedia Five station in Washington DC that Rupert Murdoch later bought and used as a launchpad for the Fox network.
Back then it played weekend-long movie marathons and Last Summer – adapted in 1969 by Frank and Eleanor Perry, who also made The Swimmer – rolled around just once, in the dead of night. I'd read the book by Evan Hunter and remembered a sleazy, exploitative scene at the end when a teenage girl goads two boys into raping another girl among the dunes on Fire Island. Come time for the rape, the station cut to commercials, and when they came back the credits were already rolling. I was used to British TV of the 1970s, a veritable cavalcade of knockers and duffings-up until Mrs T started waving that handbag. I knew Metromedia Five hacked movies to bits, but here the moment toward which the whole movie had been building was simply gone – it was amputation, not editing.

Around the same time came the first network TV airing of the ice-hockey comedy Slap Shot, which offered another approach to making nasty, sweary movies palatable to five-year-olds. I believe this was a unique cultural moment, as it constituted the public debut of the word “freakin'”, which the network superimposed over the original movie's every use of the more sensible f-word. Nowadays people use “freaking” in everyday speech in bars and on buses, the first instance I know of a network faux-obscenity taking on a life of its own.

Movies like Slap Shot and The Last Detail (87 f-words) were among the first examples of what later became a thriving parallel universe: TV versions of foul-mouthed and violent movies. You haven't lived until you've seen Goodfellas cut for TV. All 250-odd obscenities are just gone, replaced by ridiculous euphemisms (“melon-farmer”, indeed) and tin-eared pseudo-cussing. See The Usual Suspects on TV and the phrase “you fucking cocksucker” becomes “you fairy godfather”, which, come to think of it, is no less homophobic. Die Hard gives us Bruce Willis in his wifebeater vest yowling “Yippee-ki-yay, Mr Falcon!” And so on.

With uncensored movies, be they at the picture house or on cable stations like HBO, things are better, but censorship information in the US has expanded now to the point where it can actually interfere with the enjoyment of the product. An episode of say, Six Feet Under and any movie on HBO will be preceded by what I call the menu: a list of exactly what kinds of unpleasantness will be heavily featured in tonight's attraction. For example: “Graphic violence, nudity, foul language, rape” came before Dr Melfi was assaulted on The Sopranos, so they ruined that episode before it even started. Sometimes the list may extend to as many as seven gruesome items, with mutilation or torture added, until it feels like a full house in bingo.

Movie posters and ads likewise have their own little box next to the rating, explaining the things mothers may wish to protect their sprogs from. Not having any sprogs myself I feel this is information I can do without but hey, I already saw the meagre fare on offer – “Mild profanity, action violence, partial nudity”, blah – and it's already put a ceiling on my expectations. I know I won't be shocked or surprised, both of which rank high in my pantheon of cinema-going pleasures. The LA Times even adds its own spin on the rating at the end of reviews: “Too intense for young children” and so on, though I recall a wonderful misprint relating to some plasma-drenched Halloween hack-n-slasher: “Gore. Beheadings. Elviscerations.”

I was talking about all this recently with Robert Parigi, who directed his first movie, Love Object, from his own script last year. We were bemoaning the censorious state of what we like to call “Crybaby America” and Love Object, a horror movie with lots of sexual deviancy, contains plenty to rile and unnerve that constituency. A splendidly macabre psychodrama about a Collectorish young tech writer and his lifelike sex-doll, it jabs innumerable hot buttons and combines perfectly judged black humour (“You don't have to take a sex-doll to see The English Patient!”) with some deeply disturbing moments of degradation and sexual perversity. Yet its rating – “R for violence, sexuality and language” – scarcely hints at what's in store for the viewer in terms of mindbends and sweaty palms.

Parigi is not as worried by TV censorship as he is by the new phenomenon of “bespoke” or “DIY” censorship as practiced by companies such as ClearPlay and Trilogy Studios. ClearPlay will mute, bleep, skip and jump its way through the horrid and naughty bits in any DVD you want altered, while Trilogy's MovieMask software digitally alters your DVD to accord with your own comfort level. You can reduce or remove entirely all sex, violence or language. You can expunge any “vain reference to the deity” or “strong profanity”. You can cut all the bloodshed out of Saving Private Ryan without any dealings with, or permission from, Steven Spielberg or Dreamworks, who are naturally incensed.

As an artist, Parigi reasons that, since this service is likely to proliferate, he is being caught at both ends of the process: by the ratings board, and by the end-user's local censorship service. This essentially puts his work in the hands of small-town busybodies, bluenoses and religious bigots, especially the latter, as the digital censorship software folks all reside in Utah or Colorado, white bastions of the religious right, and Love Object would send these people screaming for their assault rifles. If they're going to cut it up without Parigi's permission anyway, then he wonders why he even bothers to deal with the censor's exacting and tiresome demands in the first place.

Meanwhile, Trilogy is negotiating with TiVo to see if MovieMask can be used to ruin more TV and movies than it already does. I'm reassured by one fact: the only movie Trilogy say they can't filter effectively is The Passion of the Christ. It would be like throwing away the turkey and keeping the wishbone. Hell, I might pay to see that.

Original link: http://film.guardian.co.uk/patterson/story/0,12830,1311239,00.html

Ever since I put Boris on an adult cat food diet (Purina One instead of Science Diet kitten formula), his litter box smells like something out of a psycho nightmare. Is this normal? Anybody ever had something similar happen? Which good cat food would you recommend? His kitten food poo was never this bad.

I just realized that I've spent 21 hours talking to the UK in the last month.

Wow.