Wed 19 Jul 2006
As if it wasn’t disorienting enough when a movie is censored for TV, now PBS will also blur the lips of the profanity speaker.
PBS is apparently insisting that any bleep must be accompanied by lip pixelation, so that a viewer can’t make out the offending word on screen.
Why do they even bother to show films that need to be censored on over the air channels? I tried to watch Pulp Fiction on Fox once and couldn’t keep track of what was going on. Fortunately, I had seen the movie before. I kept watching the edited version just to see how they would edit.
In reference to Matt’s earlier post regarding swearing in The Big Lebowski, the following replacement line for one of those curses has become quite famous.
In the film The Big Lebowski, John Goodman’s character repeatedly yells “This is what you get when you fuck a stranger in the ass” while trashing a car. It was infamously censored on television as “This is what you get when you have fun with a stranger in the alps!”
July 22nd, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Yeah, I noticed something in Arrested Development and one of the commentary tracks on the DVD confirmed it. When one of the characters swears, they either cover up the mouth or they shoot the other character’s reactions (so you get the back of the speaker).
Of course, my favorite is Galaxy Quest. sigourney weaver runs around a corner and says “Well screw that”, and the lips don’t match up at all. I gotta wonder if using the f’ word would have changed the rating or something.