Tuesday, November 22, 2005

What the "deleted scenes" mean...

A cursory examination of some popular Hollywood DVD's show some interesting things you probably did not get to see for some reason or another.
First, the film "Sideways" where a pair of dudes drive in NorCal and get drunk on wine and have human collisions with the opposite sex. One deleted scene borders on the blasphemous, sacriligious and the subversive. That is where one of the characters tosses the Gideon bible he finds in the motel room drawer into the garbage can! While the director claimed it was to speed up the pacing of the film, I can only imagine what the real reason was. Angry mobs protesting in front of the theaters urging a boycott, an invective-laden letter writing campaign orchestrated by Fox News and the Rev. Pat Robertson, and the possibility that the idea would spread amongst the athiests, agnostics and other free thinkers and bibles would disappear in a rapture-like spree. The next deleted scene that was probably not cut in order to speed things up since it was so very short was where they are in their car outside a pharmacy and each of the male lead characters takes 2 Vicodin and wash it down with some Pinot Noir! Better living through chemistry baby! I am sure this vignette of real life would have caused another spectacular letter writing campaign from the likes of the American Pharmacological Institute or whomever takes offense at the misuse of their products...

NEXT! The scary-weird "Donnie Darko" where in many of the deleted scenes his shrink tells him not to worry about going off of his meds, since they are in fact PLACEBOS! Yay! Huh? So, uh, he wasn't crazy after all??? Hmmm... that does change things...

After that, I got a blast out of seeing the deleted scene in "Black Hawk Down" where the Delta Force guys are in the wrong target building (another mil-spec SNAFU along the lines of bombing the Chinese Embassy in downtown Belgrade Serbia due to a map mix-up... yeah, right!) and their Ranger pals see armed silhouettes in the windows and start throwing some US Grade A lead their general direction in a brief but wildly hairy friendly fire incident that just must have "slowed down the pacing of the film", etc... Earlier on in the movie we saw the palpable friction between these two units when the Rangers were shown to be jealous of the Delta Force team having shot a wild boar and made it into an ersatz BBQ. I guess there is no reason to water down this, look what those "skinnies" did to us flag-waving morality tale, with any messy details that would show our military to be fratricidal and/or incompentent, right? Right.