I don't consider it censorship, nor do I think it should be illegal (as the Director's Guild believes), but I do consider it a form of vandalism.

If you don't like sex, violence or profanity, then just don't watch "Gangs of New York". Don't take it upon yourself to deface the filmmaker's work because you're arrogant enough to think you can improve on it.

If I was a director, I'd probably be fully supportive of the Director's Guild on this subject, just because I would hate to see my work bastardized like this.

That being said, the only form of censorship coming out of this would be the illegalization of the service, if that ever happened (which it won't).

I've watched a lot of 1)Really stupid movies 2)Movies with bright glimmers of potential buried under a lot of garbage 3)Movies where just a few changes could have vastly improved the whole thing.

Everyone who screamed in outrage "Mitichlorians!!" was guilty of arrogantly believing they could have improved Mr. Lucas' work. They were also right.

I could have improved a lot of movies. Tell the director to toss the PC-attitudes that intrude oddly at some point, or told the director to stop boasting about how much money they spent on special effects and actually spend the money (see Starship Troopers); I could require the director to hire a sergeant in the army to explain small unit tactics to the director (See Starship Troopers and Dr. Doyle's revies of it; also same, I think, for Phantom Menace and the final fight scene in the amphitheatre). I could have told the directors of Outbreak to please, please not bore us with another "It's all a result of a US government experiment on helpless natives" backstory, and instead have a more realistic backstory involving drug users and multiple users of needles, or even a smallpox martyr would have been good.

Supposedly Shakespeare rewrote a lot of the stuff he used; in doing so, he made it better. Was he a vandal?

My concern about the use of profanity in movies is how it's used. It seems to me that too many movies use profanity in too much of a gratuitous way, as if they are trying to "spice up" the dialogue. The same is true for some books. I don't see the point. Well-written scripts and books should be able to stand on their own without the use of profanity.

But then, that's just my opinion and I haven't even had my first cup of coffee, so I'm not sure I'm even awake yet.

What have the networks been doing all these years? How many hollywood movies were shown on ABC's Sunday Night at the Movies with profanity excised for the network censors? Where were the directors when that was happening?

The fact is much of this "censorship" has been occurring FOREVER on network television - it's just that someone outside the hollywood establishment is doing it now, so that makes it not alright. Whatever.

But I am put off by some of the more profane films. I had to turn off Fargo after about 10 minutes because every other word was an F-bomb. I don't need that, and the films don't need that. It's gratuitous. It's sophomoric. It's uncalled for, like a lot of films that have a sex scene just to boost the rating, or get an actress to show her "stuff."

It's sort of like acidman. Everybody was linking and reading him, but after a couple of posts, the profanity just put me off. Why alienate a potential audience that way? So I stopped reading him. But that's a blog, not a movie.

And for every person who says "but everybody curses," I only have to say that I've worked in enough places to know that everybody *doesn't* curse every minute of the day.

Life is not an episode of the "Sopranos" or "Sex in the City."

And I'm put off by people who think that people who can't handle "colorful language" are somehow wrong. I read your blog and note that there is some colorful language that surfaces now and then (Michele is the same way), but it's not over-the-top profanity. It's not every single post that has an f-bomb or crude references to genitalia.

bryan,

They are just words. A string of letters, consonants and vowels that express our feelings, emotions, etc. If I stub my toe and shout "FUCK ! FUCK! FUCK!" it's no more obscene than if I were to yell "FUDGE!" In fact, if a person is allergic to chocolate or perhaps diabetic, the word "fudge" might be even more objectionable. What matters is that I am expressing my feelings. Who gives a flying FUCK what array of letters I choose to speak? Lighten up, adjectives are good. Adjectives are our friends.

The way Cleanfilms works, I understand, is that you have to buy a licensed copy of the title and then you get a "clean" version for an additional fee.

It's the equivalent of my buying a book and ripping out a few pages that I might find objectionable before handing it to one of my children to read.

I've deprived the creator nothing.

Are we allowed to blink during a movie or go to the bathroom? Or are we paying to be forced to be subjected to the work as the creator specified?

My wife and I borrowed ET to review it for our kids. When Elliot calls his older brother "penis-breath", we realized it was NOT suitable for our kids. It's hard to argue that there's compelling artistic merit to that phrase being used.

Do the networks have the right to deny people the ability to TIVO away the commercials?

I'd buy a lot MORE content on DVDs if there were passworded levels allowing me to choose the rating level.

I've got daughters, ages 16, 14, 12 and 10 who go to religious schools. It may stun many, but they really have retained innocence that public school kids typically lose before they reach ages containing two digits. I don't think by depriving them of news of schoolbus BJs and how to use condoms that they're any worse off.

Sweeps week, MTV, TV news... nothing of value to raising children with character.

Sadly, many movies might be viewable with a mere 5 minutes of gratuitous sex/language/violence removed.

If I made a movie where every single word was a gratuitous swear word, you have two choices: watch it or don't. No one is forcing anybody to watch a movie. That's why this service is so stupid. Networks on TV clean up the language because their audience doesn't know what the hell they're going to be seeing when they flip through the channels. Get it? Don't rent "Pulp Fiction" if you don't wanna see cursing and violence.

By the way, on a digressive note: I have the luxury of seeing many American stations and many Canadian stations on my cable at home. I've noticed something strange. American channels seem to have way more censorship than Canadian channels, which seemingly have none, at all. It's no surprise to see tons of swearing and violence at any hour of the day, and at around 11pm, the full on pornography starts. Not even soft-core porn anymore. I'm talking real porn, on normal stations like CityTV.

They are just words. A string of letters, consonants and vowels that express our feelings, emotions, etc.

Ahh, yes. That's the argument racists use when they want to use the N-word too. "It's just a word."

I think I have more than the choice to watch a movie or not. There are usually multiple cuts of any particular movie. The cut they show at the theater, the director's cut, etc. And then there's the cut that gets shown on TV. If I like any of these cuts better, what's wrong with me choosing to watch one of these cuts?

And then what's wrong with making my own cut? When I watch "Phantom Menace," I fast forward through all the terrible dialogue and watch the lightsaber fights. It's my movie. I can enjoy it however I want. And if I want to buy Blues Brothers and have someone blip out the bad words in it, then that's my movie, too, to enjoy however I want. No?

It seems to me that most of the words people use to express their "emotions" are barnyard euphemisims for bodily functions or other activities that we normally perform in privacy. They are performed in private because in our culture there is a certain element of baseness about these functions. Like "shit" stinks, man! I don't want to see it or hear about it (although I admit I do say that and other words of that nature under my breath in times of stress, myself - I'm not a PRUDE!!:-).

The same goes for "fuck" or as Tim TS says"FUCK, FUCK, FUCK". I do not care to watch others as they copulate and I don't want to hear about it either. I do not understand why something as beautiful as sex is used to express great anger or rage. Sex is not base but it should not be trivialized by the voyuerism of Hollywood or the F word at every other sentence. That is what makes it base. A word here or there is colorful. A whole lot of those words or descriptions is ignorant.

Payne, but it's illegal to resell it. But that's a debate for another time...