You mess with Harpo Marx, you get the horns.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

It just &%^$# frees you to be more &*^%$! honest

Hollywood is rejoicing at the success of "R-rated" comedies. No more must comedic actors in Hollywood rely on cheap innuendo and suggestive humour. Now they can drop F-bombs in scripts with the regularity of articles (not a "willy" joke), nouns, and periods (Not a reference to menustration).

"It just frees you to be more honest," said Judd Apatow, director of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" (Subtitle: "Porky's Midlife Crisis").

Yes, now instead of implying sex or bawdyness as repressed amateurs like the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny did, Hollywood's finest can openly refer to the male anatomy without resorting to words like "Johnson", "dong", "bratwurst", "Satchmo", "pickle", or "Farfenugen". They can openly speak and joke (although I use the word loosely) about the act of coitus without have to use code words like "the nasty", "shag", "rutting", "gettin' funky", and "Yahtzee!"

"These are films that capitalize on the notion of being able to push (Not a reference to childbirth) the envelope," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor (Not a reference to Exhibitionism) Relations.

Yes, how grateful we are that we can now push the envelope into the nether regions of our society, and joke about things like getting ones gonads trapped in the merciless teeth of a pants zipper (There's Something About Mary), or someone having "relations" with a hot dessert (American Pie).

Just what the hell was a filmmaker like Orson Welles doing making pretentious crap like Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil when he could be riveting Americans to the silver screen with playful mise-en-scene depictions of pastry love backed by a popular soundtrack of current hits and classic oldies? Why was Hitchcock wasting his time with explorations of the human psyche's capacity for fear and voyerism by having Janet Leigh slaughtered in a motel shower, when he could have easily turned it into a hilarious classic by instead having her stroll out into the courtyard, slip on a banana peel, lose her towel, and expose her jollies to a passing high-school football team armed to the teeth with Kodaks. Think of the montage!

Thank the stars we have the R-rated comedy of today to show us the way. If only Buster Keaton had such freedom! If he had, instead of a history obsessed war thingy like the General we might have had Porky's III: The Railroad! Maybe even Old School with dangerous stunts! Chaplin's The Gold Rush? How about The Gold Tush!

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