Gangs of television

It's always fun watching some movies on cable television. The first two times I remember noticing the difference with a television-safe broadcast was with Independence Day and Die Hard. With Independence Day, Randy Quaid should say "Alright, you alien assholes" but on television he says "Alright, you alien animals". The problem is that there's an extra syllable, and in order to get this line to sync with the scene, they had to speed it up, and the way the mouth moves on "asshole" with the sound of "animal" struck me as particularly funny as a kid. Die Hard's edit was for nudity. There's a scene right when the terrorists first seize control of the building and the party, and a girl is dragged by the arm shirtless through a hallway. On television, there's a quick zoom in to avoid seeing the exposed breasts, and as a result most of the shot is just of an empty hall being panned and scanned. Of course, there's many other examples of this, and these two certainly aren't the more famous examples of edits (see Goodfellas), but they are distinctly in my mind.

Watching Gangs of New York this afternoon on AMC is just as fun. For whatever reason, it's acceptable to say the word "nigger", but not "fuck". And, I was sure my favorite line wasn't going to be in the film, but there it was, with Bill draped in the flag, for all to hear: "your mouth all glued up with cummy juice?" There's also the issue of nudity, because before that scene is one set in a brothel where many of the women are either topless or so loosely clothed that they expose themselves when bending over. Rather than try to cut around this like with my Die Hard example or by pixelating or blocking the nudity, the television network decided to maskover the nudity with a flesh-tonned blur that made it appear, strangely, to just be a breast with no nipple. So odd.

But, the most striking thing I noticed is that this movie could have been amazing if it wasn't for the casting. DiCaprio is too much of a lightweight to be continually paired up with Scorsese. He was fine in Aviator and theDeparted, but he's no DeNiro. Then, there's Cameron Diaz who shouldn't have even been allowed on the set. It's not that she is a bad actress, but her talents aren't suited for a role like hers in this movie. I even have issues with Brendan Gleeson and John C. Reilly who are both usually more than serviceable. Really, it's Daniel Day Lewis' show.

Watching the movie, it makes me cringe what might have happened if Taxi Driver was made today. How much pressure would there have been on Scorsese to make the love story between Travis and Betsy? Cybill Shepherd was already the weak link in that movie. Oh, how the world would have been in Scorsese made Gangs of New York when he wanted to in a time with more room for experimentation from auteurs.