Life is Funny

I am personally not a fan of unnecessary foul language, profanity, cussing and swearing. However, there are times that it needs to be used in movies to go with the scene.

If you’ve seen the movie Scarface starring Al Pacino then you know that some of those scenes have heavy amounts of foul language in them, and for good reason. He plays a poor, uneducated refugee who turns to crime to earn enough money to live the American dream.

So, as a result, he uses a lot of profanity in the movie, it just goes with his character.

Now if you take Tony Montana and change his quotes..

FROM THIS: “I’m Tony Montana! You fuck wit me, you fuckin’ wit da best!”

TO THIS: “I’m Tony Montana! You mess wit me, you fool wit da best!”

It just takes the whole drama out of the scene, tones it right down, and makes Tony Montana sound like someone you would want to bring home and introduce him to your parents.

(Well actually, I think we’d all like to bring Al Pacino home, since he’s a star, and introduce him to everyone we know, but that’s not the point)

I can usually tolerate a language censored move on TV for about 15 minutes before I finally give up and flip the channel.

What sparked this tonight, is that I was watching the movie Christine tonight and it was the scene where he meets Will Darnell played by Robert Prosky. He’s a character in the movie who owns a dirty run down salvage yard. He smokes cigars, spits regularly, wears old filthy clothes, looks like he hasn’t bathed in a week.. A real awful person.

But on the censored version of the movie, this guy sounds as sweet as pie as he politely puts Arnie in his place by supposedly talking down to him.

It totally ruins the movie, especially when you’ve seen it before.

So let’s take a look at this problem:

People who have never seen the movie before, are bound to be put off at the “poor acting” which basically refers to a horrible script when you edit out the true conversation and replace it with flowery, polite ways of talking.

Censored movies on TV ruin it for people who have already seen the movie.

Censored movies on TV ruin it for people who are seeing the movie for the first time too.

So why bother to put them on? Either raise the tolerance level, or don’t show the movie at all. They are so worried about Al Pacino using profanity on Scarface, but it’s okay to show him snorting cocaine, or shooting people, etc.

It’s such a stupid double standard, why do we tolerate it?

Life is Funny.