on the fox news tv station i sometimes see advertisements for a new tech product called Clear Play
basically it's a DVD player with software inside that allows you to download information to the player about controversial scenes in movies (sex, nudity, violence, etc.) and when you play a particular movie you can tell Clear Play to cut out those scenes entirely
Clear Play
i'm confused on the target demographic though - it's obviously targeted to parents with kids who don't want to expose the kiddos to content that they're not yet mature enough to handle. but wouldn't family-values parents dedicated to safeguarding their children from bad influences likely not be interested in movies with that type of content anyways?
or if the parents like watching movies with some 'blue' content to them couldn't they just, i don't know, watch them when the kids are asleep or playing over at someone else's house? can't see what the point is of watching T2 without the violence or Glengarry Glen Ross missing entire scenes because someone dropped an F bomb - the films wouldn't make any sense, it'd be like experiencing a constant and sudden attack of amnesia every few minutes.
the new Rambo movie sans action scenes would probably be ten minutes long; kids would think all Rambo ever did was walk around in a jungle for a bit, then mysteriously be in a village, then suddenly be in another part of a jungle or on a boat, the end.
might be fun to get one just to mess with the different filters and level of filtering to see what kind of strange product you could make out of your favorite movies
2 comments:
When I loved in Phoenix, there was a nearby videostore that rented movies which had been re-cut for the sensitive folks of Chandler, Arizona. (A) I'm pretty sure that re-cutting a film in this manner is illegal in some shape or form, and (B) I didn't really understand renting Goodfellas with the violence and sweas cut out, either.
The store shut its doors while we were still there. I'd seen some stories that Hollywood was working on how they were going to sue these shops (apparently they were popping up in more places than Chandler).
Fascinating that folks are self-censorig this way at home.
As a parent who frequently watches movies, with and without the kiddos, I can maybe shed some light on the thinking behind such a device. Jacob (who is 5) loves Indiana Jones since the incarnation of LEGO Indiana Jones, and plays the Wii game often. However, he has only seen "The Last Crusade" as we deemed it the only one to meet our standard of movie for him. If we had Clear Play, though, we might be able to show him "Raiders" without spears impailing bodies and people being run over by trucks. So he'd get the action and adventure without having to cover his eyes during the gory parts! Not that I want one of those, as I think kids can wait to see such things when they get older, plus there are plenty of things for them to watch without censoring adult movies.
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