I have never understood why so many people feel that it’s acceptable to murder someone in some of the most gruesome fashions around (Braindead, I’m looking at you) but if you say “fuck” or show a penis or something, you get shat all over. No wonder kids are so violent now-a-days when people totally ignore all violent content but chuck a spaz over nudity and sex.
I have seen kids that have been barred from South Park watching those ultra-gory slashers, Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street, Evil dead, etc. Some people really confuse me.
Personally, I always thought of it in levels of stuff. Is watching a full-on blow-job worse than seeing Indiana Jones shoot someone? Yes! But is seeing a pair of boobs worse than watching a man have his head ripped in two and start spewing brains all over the place? No!
I always considered myself against needless gore and sex in films (gratuitious=bad), but I feel none are inheritly “worse” than the other. Bad Taste is still the greatest though, am I a hypocrite?
ParentalAdvisory, are you in NY? Then why bother with Blockbuster at all? Go to Kim’s or another indie video store. I mean, it’s like those folks who eat at McDonald’s and then complain about getting fat.
Vote with your dollars. They’re a private business, they have the right to rent or not rent whatever they want, and you have the right to go elsewhere.
I once read an explanation for this – when we see violence in movies, the violence is fake, but when we see sex, it’s the real McCoy (with real Bones!). Anything offensive is OK if it’s fake. I’m not sure if this is true. Sure, I’d hate to see actual violence – that would really disturb me – but sense a double standard as well.
And what’s the deal in the OP with censoring drug use? To me that would be just as bad. Films like Traffic would be rendered meaningless, and the great works of Cheech and Chong would simply be banned.
What about Hollywood Video? We just moved, and now there’s a Hollywood Video somewhat close. Do they censor or carry anything other than the approved versions? How is their selection? I heard that the rentals are 5 days, which makes them almost as good as netflix, who I had to give up because I got tired of waiting months to get a new release and its bonus disc companion at the same time.
As Tradnor pointed out, they don’t actually. What usually happens is that BB will refuse to carry explicit or unrated material, and in response the studios will offer a rated or edited version. The video store doesn’t censor their movies, per se. I know it’s really just a matter of semantics, but I think there’s a crucial difference between saying a company censors its products (which, point of fact, there is no actual law against) and saying a company chooses its products to suit its target audience.
I’m not trying to justify the side in favor of video stores, but technically they’re not the ones censoring the material, the studios are.
Right. I get it now. That’s sort of what I assumed but I didn’t say anything as I didn’t have enough information. Its still a pretty sucky arrangment though. But I suppose its accpetable for the company to do it.
Yeah, it does suck. To me it says that the company doesn’t think it’s customers are smart/responsible enough to monitor their own children’s viewing habits (well, arguably many are not, but that’s another thread altogether). When I managed a BB though, I was very glad that we were a franchise and didn’t have to comply to the edited version-only rule. We even carried a generic line of ‘Girls Gone Wild’-esque videos, but did go so far as to white out the appropriate parts of the coverbox, what with little people running around and all.
The question then becomes one of a chicken & egg situation: are the studios to blame for caving in to the video store giant, or is the store chain to blame for refusing to carry the regular version?
Are these ‘edited’ versions of the films always produced by the original studio who made the movie for BB, or are there cases like a Wal*Mart type thing where they get some of the movies from places such as Clean Flicks?
Hollywood video is SO much better than BB. They don’t censor, or carry dumbed-down versions(that I can tell), and their selection is pretty good. If you’re looking for indie, this isn’t the place, but if you want mostly mainstream new releases, some older stuff, and the few indie flicks that actually become popular, it’s an ok place.
i never go to blockbuster anymore because of this and their other crimes against cinema. I don’t know enough about hollywood to know if they censor videos or not. Hollywood and BB killed most of the independent video stores in the Quad cities, but luckily here in SF independent stores are all over, and i can get good rare films at good stores with good people.
Not sure if they have a policy of not carrying unrated films, but Hollywood definately does carry editied versions. The one I’m aware of is the oft mentioned “Requiem For a Dream.”
For those in the Seattle area that aren’t aware of how great a place it is - get to Scarecrow Video now.
Wow. Sure, rate a movie, and warn viewers that there’s nudity/drugs/violence in it (although the latter two are a lot worse than the first, obviously). But releasing a censored version? What, they wanted to target the 4-8 year olds as well?
In the good ole days, no vidoe stores, not even Blockbuster, censored the movies they carry, and it was good. The studios didn’t censor them either. The idea was that since people were renting out specific movies, they were responsible for knowing their content, and so long as you didn’t rent adult stuff to kids, it wasn’t the store’s business to control what adults chose to rent.
Then back in the eighties, encouraged by the activities of the Meese Commission, Donald Wildmon and his American Family Assn. got on Blockbuster’s case bigtime about the content of some of the films they were renting. It wasn’t that Blockbuster was carrying anything worse than anybody else was, in fact, Blockbuster eschewed XXX films and didn’t carry independent films that had wilder stuff on them. But Wildmon and his buddies had figured out that Blockbuster was the 800-pound gorilla in the video rental biz, and if they could make Blockbuster bow down, th other stores would follow.
So they started a big letter-writing campaign to Blockbuster execs and more germanely to Congress, and Blockbuster being a big corporation, it quickly dropped trou and bent over like it was Donald Wildmon’s personal love slave.
Blockbuster itself does not censor films. What they do is require that studios only provide to it films that fit whatever level of filters Wildmon and Blockbuster have worked out. I’m not sure if it’s just a mater of needing an R rating to get into Blockbuster, but of needing a soft R rather than a hard R, because most cable movies have R ratings but much of what you see on cable is less censored than what you see in Blockbuster.
I don’t know that Hollywood Video has entered into any agreements with Wildmon, but I do know that Hollywood Video carries censored videos. This may only be because that’s what’s readily available. Mom and Pop videos are much better about carrying uncensored stuff, because it’s a potential advantage for them, although most renters seem unaware that Mullah Wildmon controls what they see in Blockbuster and elsewhere (this has been going on for years.
Next post, I’ll list a few censored videos and what got censored.
A couple of years back I reviewed softcore videos, and discovered a few censorship issues. Here’s what I found:
Spun – as noted, digitized coverage of female genitals, some swear words.
Over The Wire – completely cut out a non-explicit consensual sexual bondage scene between a man and his wife (he’s a sheriff and they got frisky with his handcuffs).
Hotel Erotica – complete cut out a non-explicit lesbian sex scene. The scene was not only non-explicit but rather silly in places – in one part, the lesbians knelt on their hands and knees facing away from each other and bumped their butts gently together – no double dildos or anything like that.
Striking Rememblance – Cut out part of another consensual bondage scene. They left in the part where the woman is tied to the bedpost while doing it missionary style, but when they rolled over and did it doggie style, that got cut. Apparently, that old missionary position only thing still holds in some circles.
Romance – Entirely hacked up. All sorts of things missing. Don’t even think about renting this one from Blockbuster.
There’s others, but I can’t recall them offhand. This seems plenty bad enough.
Blockbuster does not admit they censor their movies, they just put that R rating thing on there as a warning. My rule is, I don’t rent from Blockbuster any more. I buy from Half.com and I drive ten miles into town to do my renting at a Mom and Pop place to avoid renting at any of the Blockbusters that are within a mile or two of my house. But I doubt a lot of other people are doing the same.
In the case of corporate BB, they’re always provided from the studio. Also, BB doesn’t demand that the studios provide edited versions, but rather they state that they will not carry films with a certain rating or content, and the studio then produces (of their own accord) a version suitable to meet the needs of BB standards. I believe that it would be a violation of the agreement with the studios to alter the films through a service such as Clean Flicks.
Why do they hate them? Blockbuster’s got to have one of the largest market shares for rentals, and rentals can add quite a lot of money to a movie’s gross.
They like the revenues they get from Blockbuster, they hate the fact that they have to edit another version for them – costs them time and money and pisses off their creative people mightily.
