I hate to do this so early in my blogging, and hope it does not drive people off from reading future blogs, but I am going to have to get out my soapbox.
Just two nights after watching a movie that had a PG-13 rating for violence but had no profanity that I heard, I had TiVo'd Revolutionary Road, which was supposed to be a good movie, according to all the reviews that I had read. I saw it was rated R, but assumed (which was probably my first mistake) that it was due to sexual situations or nudity (given the fact that the movie starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet of Titanic fame). Little did I know that within the first ten minutes my ears were barraged with a cacophony of swearing that may have made a drunk sailor blush. Leo DiCaprio himself took the Lord's name in vain no less than 5 times, not to mention several other questionable, if not unnecessary, profane words, in the 10 minutes of the movie that I managed to sit through before deleting it from the drive and apologizing to my wife for subjecting her to such a movie.
My questions to Hollywood is this: why does a movie have to have swearing in it? In my opinion, the only "good" (and I use that word very loosely) reason for swearing in a movie is if the movie is a biopic and the protagonist was a person that was epitomized by the occasional swear word. But, in the last four DiCaprio movies that I have caught bits and pieces of (The Beach, The Aviator, The Departed, and now Revolutionary Road) it seems like the norm rather than the exception was to have the movie littered with profanity. And for what reason? As far as I could tell it was to "advance the story."
Which actually brings me to my next point: is it necessary to swear or continuously drop the "F-bomb" just to advance the story? Chances are there is another way to say what needs to be said without using outlandish amounts of profanity to say it.
I was about to say, "Chances are that we have become so accustomed to swearing on television that it does not even effect us," but even television does not allow the type of language that was used in the first ten minutes of the movie. They would either bleep this language or not allow it in the program in the first program, depending on who the network that the program was being run on, and the time of day that the program was running.
I am most definitely not stating that we should do away with more mature programming; I am simply stating that if Hollywood can produce a movie that has a rating of R that does not have any swearing (Passion of the Christ) or a PG-13 movie that has no swearing (Sherlock Holmes), then why do they have to put out movies that do?
I had actually been looking forward to watching a movie at home with my wife, but Revolutionary Road will never find its way onto my shelf, unless someone comes out with a "clean" version of it, which may be nothing more than the title and credits, and a couple of minutes of dialog from the first five minutes of the movie, before the swear parade started. I don't think I'll have the problem with swearing tonight with Tale of Despereaux.
Okay, I am getting off my soapbox now.
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Until the next time,
Thanks for your time.
