The question of how many times I've seen Caligula

I don't mind telling you, I rewatched Caligula on Friday night only for prurient reasons.

"Too right," you might say, especially if you were Australian. "What other reason to watch Caligula could there be?"

Indeed. It's infamous for its smuttiness. For its artless, gross smuttiness.

When I watched Caligula almost 20 years ago, on Halloween of 2006, I ended up seeing a truncated version of it. It was a lot shorter than I was expecting, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:45, and had a lot less unsimulated sex in it than I was expecting. None, in fact. Indeed, I figured that version -- the one that famously revolted Roger Ebert and others, the one that so many of the participants were eager to remove their names from, the one that was financed by Penthouse magazine founder Bob Guccione -- was lost to time.

Until I saw that a version of Caligula was on Kanopy, called Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and it was 2 hours and 58 minutes long.

Hello, unsimulated sex.

Now, I'm not just a perv. If I just want unsimulated sex, of course I can get it in 15 seconds on my nearest web browser. I don't need to watch a movie whose principal photography occurred 50 years ago (released to cinemas three years later). That's even before Debbie Does Dallas. 

No, the real curiosity for me was the proximity of the unsimulated sex to a bunch of actors and actresses who have Dame and Sir in front of their names. (John Gielgud and Helen Mirren got that honorarium, though Malcolm McDowell and Peter O'Toole missed out. I would have thought for sure O'Toole was a Sir. The internet tells me it was offered to him in 1987 but he declined.) I just wanted to experience how unusual that would seem. 

I tried to experience it in 2006, but the nudity in that film was of a rather generic nature, nothing that would have shocked audiences and critics at the time. 

Well, I wasn't going to find that in this Kanopy version either. In fact, I was going to find a version of Caligula that isn't really Caligula at all.

And so we get to my question: Have I seen Caligula once, or twice?

When I started watching, there came a message on screen that almost made me stop watching. As part of a prologue containing about six pages of text with 20 to 40 words on each page, which established the film's troubled and sordid history, there came finally to a page that contained the following:

"This unprecedented edit is composed entirely of previously unseen footage."

What's that you say?

And:

Um, how is that possible?

How indeed. 

How could a film exist that would be considered the "same film" as another film, yet use not a second of the footage from that film?

I couldn't believe it, and in fact, I sort of still don't. 

How can a director get so much coverage as to be able to make -- not him personally, but someone else nearly 50 years later -- an entire almost three-hour movie that is nothing but outtakes? And have that movie be even slightly coherent?

One of the stories in the sordid history of Caligula is how the film ended up costing twice its budget. But even when a film is guilty of those sorts of excesses -- the same sort that a certain sadistic Roman emperor may have been guilty of -- how could there be zero scenes that two different people interpreting the available footage would both agree should be part of the final cut?

How? How? How?

As I was starting to watch the movie, I began doubting that I'd read the prologue's declaration correctly. Because this Caligula does feel like a complete movie, whereas the one I saw 20 years most decidedly did not. In fact, I remember that movie ending and me not even realizing it was about to end. Maybe I'd sort of stopped paying attention.

So I did continue watching Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, despite knowing that my hopes of unsimulated sex had been dashed. It may be that the curiosity of this entirely new footage spurred me on. How else to explain settling in for a three-hour movie you know to be terrible, without the promise of the single thing most responsible for it being terrible, the hardcore porn edited into it by the founder of Penthouse? (In this scenario I am arguing that the thing that makes it terrible is the only thing that makes it worth watching, which is contrary to your approach to most films.)

There were only two things I definitively remembered about Caligula from my first viewing, in terms of specifics. There were general things I remembered, like the fact that the movie had very few close-ups, and seemed to be filmed primarily at the depth of a person watching a play from about the 30th row. Which made it decidedly uncinematic indeed. But specifics? Only two for certain:

1) There's a scene that's stuck with me, where men are buried in the colosseum dirt up to their necks, and are decapitated by some sort of giant threshing machine as spectators watch;

2) Helen Mirren gets naked.

I thought, if I found that either of these things was in the movie, I would have to know that the opening text was lying to me, or that I had misread it.

Sure enough, both scenes came along. Though I should say, Mirren is naked enough in Caligula that I can't say for sure her nude scenes here are the same scenes as the ones I saw previously. 

So let's just focus on the thresher scene.

Indeed, one of the most callous acts by Caligula is to arrest and execute the very man who helped bring him to power. Macro, played by Guido Mannari, strangles the previous emperor, O'Toole's STD-infested Tiberius, when the man is on his death bed but just won't die. Caligula was going to bash his head in but is too much of a coward to do so. (We originally think he's had a crisis of conscience. We later learn that must have been wrong, because Caligula has no conscience.) So Macro does the deed and would justifiably believe he's now going to be in Caligula's good graces forever. Instead, at an opportune moment, Caligula has him arrested, buried to his neck in dirty and run over with a machine that lops his head from his shoulders.

Memorable, right?

And yes I remembered this scene, and yes it played out pretty much like I remembered it playing out.

So am I to believe that there is different footage of the thresher scene that was used instead of the footage I saw in 2006? Isn't one bit of footage of a thresher cutting a man's head off as good as another?

It's almost enough to make me try to track down the vastly inferior version of Caligula I saw previously, though that might be difficult because I think there are like a dozen versions of this movie out there -- probably almost none of which are readily available. (I think I rented it form the library in 2006, though I can't be sure. And that would be a library in Los Angeles anyway.)

So yeah. While I have to take the film's word for it that this is all new footage, I just can't believe that anyone in their right mind would have rejected all this good footage and opted for weaker versions of it. Because the producers of the Ultimate Cut wouldn't have rejected better versions of the footage, merely to be able to see that this version "is composed entirely of previously unseen footage," would they? What they say they wanted, and what they certainly achieved, was to make the best version of Caligula they could, no matter how they had to Frankenstein it.

The whole thing just seems highly implausible.

Even more plausible? I thought Caligula: The Ultimate Cut was pretty good. And certainly very watchable for three hours without me ever getting bored.

What it does that the other version didn't do is it gives a complete arc of this grotesque man, from rise to fall with every step of the way in between. In fact, the footage that they scrounged from over 90 hours of available archival footage only proves just how deliberately this narrative was conceived by director Tinto Brass. Supposedly this also sticks to the script originally written by Gore Vidal, which proves that that, also, was a good script, eager to make a fairly traditional story of the lifecycle of a monster. 

The interest by Penthouse was always in the fact that a true version of Caligula's life could only be depicted with (near) extreme sex, and violence that was more implied than extreme. So even in this version that doesn't contain Guccione's superfluous porn scenes, we get a lot of full nudity for both men and women, some simulated sex involving erect penises (though some of those are not real), and orgy scenes that would make the characters in Eyes Wide Shut blush. The movie still titillates on this basic level, even without the unsimulated sex -- though it should be said that most of it just feels sad and gross, which is also the point. Probably the only actual titillation I experienced was seeing Mirren's sex scenes, since she's such an icon and since she was so terribly beautiful back then. (She's still so beautiful, but a younger generation is only familiar with her from age 50 onward. When she was around 30, I feel like she could have played Helen of Troy.)

So yes, I'm glad I did watch all three hours of what seemed like a very different Caligula to me in many respects, but still familiar from the movie I saw 20 years ago.

As to the ultimate question of its categorization -- whether this should go in my lists as an entirely new movie, or a second viewing of a movie I'd already seen -- I think I'll just have to go with this being the same movie. They can tell me the footage is entirely new until they're blue in the face, but that just does not strike me as credible, so I choose not to believe it. Some of it had to be the same.

And since this is effectively an augmented version of a movie I've already seen, I won't accord it a second spot on my viewing list, just as I haven't accorded their own spot the quite different versions I've seen of Cinema Paradiso, Donnie Darko, Blade Runner and others.

The fact that I can't name a lot more examples than those three indicates how much I don't like watching "unofficial" versions of movies, probably for this very reason. I feel like once you've released a movie into the world, that's it. You can't keep tweaking it because you were unhappy with how it was made the first time. The time for doing that was while you were still in the editing room, even if factors outside your control were controlling you. 

But I guess I'm glad they did it with Caligula, because the special place this film always held in my mind for its notoriety now gets an additional special place, for its successful portrayal of a man of unsurpassed cruelty and baseness. 

Cut it out

I noticed that another version of Apocalypse Now is releasing in theaters next month.

And rolled my eyes.

Oh, I'd be okay with a big screen re-release of the original Apocalypse Now. I probably wouldn't grouse about it, either, if they released the director's cut, even though I am not a fan of multiple cuts of the same movie being in existence, in general. It's existed for quite a long time so at least I wouldn't have anything new to grouse about.

But do we have to get another new cut, a third cut, of this classic movie?

This uncertainty about what movie you're talking about when you're talking about the movie is a thing that has plagued Blade Runner. I must say that I have lost a little of my love for Blade Runner just because there are so many damn versions of this movie floating around out there.

Will I have to do the same with Apocalypse Now?

Yeah, it'll be available on IMAX. That's cool. But really, it could have been the original version and still been on IMAX. When I watched Titanic on IMAX in conjunction with its 15th anniversary in 2012, that was cool and I enjoyed the experience. But at least it wasn't with 20 minutes' worth of new scenes that weren't good enough to be in the original movie.

To directors and studios who keep toying with the "ultimate, final, be-all-and-end-all" versions of their movies, I say:

Enough.

Cut it out.

Please. For all our sakes.

Sometimes they come back

If you had told me I would need to find an alternate poster for the movie 54, because I was actually going to write about 54 twice on my blog (and have a policy of never using the same poster twice as the lead art on a post), I would have told you you were crazy.

Yet 54 was the lead art on this post back in 2009, and somehow, I find this forgettable movie elbowing its way back on to my blog again in 2015.

Reason: They are re-releasing this dog. In Australia, anyway.

I saw the poster (not this one, the more familiar one) on the wall at Cinema Nova on Saturday. At first I mistook it for vintage decoration, since Nova does have exactly one such poster -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- hanging among the ones advertising upcoming releases. But nope, emblazoned along the bottom was a June 11th release date.

June 11th, 2015, not June 11th, 1998.

I don't know who saw it fit to restore some never-before-seen footage to this movie and actually try again with it. Aren't there certain movies where you should just walk away?

The write-up advertising it on the Nova website describes it as a "weightier, darker, more drug-addled and above all queerer film than the original." That's the result of restoring 40 minutes of the film that were cut at the producers' behest, and trashing the 25 minutes of reshoots that were demanded to fix the gap of those missing 40 minutes. This version played at this year's Berlin Film Festival in February, apparently to some acclaim, else it likely wouldn't have seen the light of day beyond that.

But other than director Mark Christopher's mother and father, who is clamoring for another go at 54? Exactly no one. At the very most, just release a special edition BluRay and be done with it. Though wikipedia tells me that a special edition BluRay was already released in 2012, containing "several additional and alternate scenes."

It reminds me of the inexplicable existence of something like three or four additional versions of Oliver Stone's Alexander, beyond the one that was released in 2004. I haven't seen any of the versions, but I know the film to be a dud on the order of 54. Yet as recently as last year, versions were still emerging -- and apparently, the most recent one is good enough to have landed on critic Keith Uhlich's highly eccentric top 10 of 2014 (though to contextualize that eccentricity, his list also included several TV shows).

An ordinary rant on this topic would decry the need to meddle with classics like Star Wars and E.T., which have had infamous changes made to the "official" versions of those films. But that's tampering with something sacred, and this ... this is tampering with something irrelevant. With movies that should be lost to the dustbin of cinematic regrets.

I guess if this footage makes 54 a better movie, why not? I just think it's overestimating the public's appetite for it, that's all.

At least it gives Neve Campbell and Ryan Phillippe the chance to say "I have a movie coming out this weekend!"

In Australia, anyway.

The original version got it wrong

My wife and I attended a performance of the musical Hair on Saturday night at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Since that's her favorite show, I got us a pair of tickets as a Christmas present for her. (Always love the Christmas presents where the giver gets to be an equal beneficiary.)

We really enjoyed ourselves, especially at the very end. After the bows, the cast waved us up on stage, and anyone who wanted to could go up and dance to a reprise of "Let the Sunshine In." (Incidentally, we had a debate about the lyrics of this song -- is it "Let the Sunshine In" or "Let the Sun Shine In"? I actually like the second one better, but the first one is correct. However, the poster you see above lists it the second way. It's a mystery.) Not only was it glorious just to be on the stage, in among the sets and actors, singing this epic song, but we also happened to be dancing next to Kate Beckinsale and Columbus Short, with their respective spouses.

However, just before the very end was perhaps our most puzzling moment.

See, my wife and I are both most familiar with Milos Forman's 1979 film version of Hair, not the stage version, which debuted on Broadway in 1968. I've only seen the film once, about five years ago, whereas she's seen it countless times, enough to know the songs by heart. Neither of us had seen any other version.

And you know what, the original stage version does not have the dramatic punch at the end that the movie has. Nor does it have as strong a narrative spine as the film version, though we're speaking in relative terms here, since neither version is particularly heavy on plot.

Now, this could clearly be an instance of liking the first version of something you're exposed to better than other versions. I discussed that phenomenon at length here. But in most instances of remakes -- or in this case, film adaptations of Broadway musicals -- the essential plot elements are virtually identical. In Michael Weller's adaptation of Gerome Ragni and James Rado's book, there are some big differences -- differences Ragni and Rado were not pleased about, but that's their problem.

From all my previous understanding of Hair, the main character/protagonist is George Berger, played in the film by Treat Williams. He's the first hippie you're introduced to, and he's a touchpoint throughout, kind of like the gravitational pull at the center of all the hippies we meet along the way. The other primary character is Claude Hooper Bukowski, played in the film by John Savage. Claude is also a hippie, and he's got his own song about himself, imagining himself from Manchester, England -- even though he was raised in Flushing, NY. (A sample lyric from the song: "I believe in God, and I believe that God, believes in Claude, and that's me.") In the film version, however, Claude is a country bumpkin just awakening to the hippie movement, fresh into New York City from Oklahoma. Claude and Berger both have feelings for Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), but keeping with the free love themes of the play, they aren't rivals for her affections, but rather, share each other. (Now that I've seen the stage version more recently, I can't tell you if there's an edge to their relationships in the movie.)

Throughout the course of an admittedly minimal narrative, Claude gets drafted to go to Vietnam. He attends a ceremony in which a lot of other young hippies are burning their draft cards, but he can't do it. In the film, however, when he's right about to show up to the military induction center, Berger takes his place at the last minute, leaving an innocent Claude to explore the new zest for life he's discovered, and possibly his feelings for Sheila. It seems that Berger believes he'd be able to survive Vietnam whereas Claude wouldn't, but that's beside the point, because Berger thinks he'll be able to get "Claude" disqualified from having to go. When it doesn't work out that way, the last thing we see, during the rousing reprise of "Manchester, England," is Berger in uniform, marching onto a plane for his deployment to Vietnam -- where he either actually dies, or where it's understood that he'll die. I don't remember exactly how the film ends, I just remember Treat Williams' scared but stolid face as he marches onto the plane, accepting the sacrifice he's made for Claude. It's a classic hero's sacrifice, one that I'm sure appears in many films -- it's too bad the only one I can think of right now is Armageddon, where Bruce Willis takes Ben Affleck's place at the last minute, as the guy who has to stay behind for the suicide mission of detonating the nukes they drilled into the asteroid.

But Berger doesn't have his Armageddon moment in the original stage play. In the original, Claude is the one who goes off to war. In fact, the last image in the show we saw on Saturday is Claude's still body, in uniform and perfectly straight, lying on an American flag. He went to Vietnam and he died.

It's a striking image, but it doesn't have the same impact as the end of the film. For starters, it means that Berger is basically a glorified bystander. He never makes a sacrifice for Claude, so why is he even picked out as the "main character," the guy we meet first? Berger's role as the main character is only important if he gets to make his sacrifice for Claude. Other than that, he's just another hippie who failed to convince Claude he should burn his draft card.

This is certainly a strange indictment to be making. Hair was a popular musical for 11 years before it made it to the screen, so for those 11 years, the only Hair anyone knew was Claude going to Vietnam and dying. I can understand why Gerome Ragni and James Rado were pissed off about the film version, which essentially says, "The original musical that everyone loves is not good enough as is. It needs to have more dramatic conflict and more of a heroic sacrifice in the third act."

But you know what? It's true. It may have been highly presumptuous for Michael Weller and Milos Forman to come along and change the musical, but their changes work.

But that could just be because a film and a stage show have different needs. On stage, you can get away with going light on plot. You can loosely connect a bunch of rousing musical numbers and lightly sketched out characters, and it's enough for a show. In fact, in a post-show discussion of other live theater we've seen, I told my wife about the musical Fosse, to which I'd gotten free tickets when I lived in New York. The show has no narrative throughline, but rather, is just a collection of stagings of Bob Fosse's most famous numbers (from such shows as Cabaret, Chicago, All that Jazz, etc.). It's no wonder I didn't think very highly of that show. But the point is, you can get away with it. It's theater, and different rules apply.

In a film, you need a strong narrative. In most cases, anyway. The characters need to have characters arcs, journeys. And I think Forman and Weller detected that George Berger needed to have a journey. He needed to start out as a free-loving hippie who's fun to hang out with, but is defined by his lack of commitment. He needs to start out as charismatic but unreliable. Over the course of his journey, he must develop the personal fortitude to stand up for something, do something for somebody else, and suffer the consequences of his new enlightenment.

That's what gives a loose story about the liberal revolution of the 1960s its emotional core. I don't want to call the stage version "unemotional" -- after all, Claude going to Vietnam and dying is certainly tragic. But it's predictably tragic. Berger taking his place is one of those unpredictable things that teaches you something about the capacity for goodness in the human soul.

Because we had such a fun time at the Pantages on Saturday night, with such a joyous climax, this discussion is largely academic. I don't want you to think that we sat there all night, criticizing the choices made by the person who originally dreamed up Hair. The real takeaway from the show was the energy, the rousing production numbers, the soaring vocals ("Aquarius! A-quaaaa-reeee-ussss!") and the cast breaking the fourth wall in such delightful ways, including running up the aisles and occasionally interacting with the audience. Not to mention the fact that were actually up on stage at the very end.

But I do think it's interesting to consider how, at least in the case of Hair, a dramatic work can be a work in progress, possibly not having reached the definitive version of itself in its original form -- even if that original form is staggeringly popular. Instead of being annoyed, Ragni and Rado should have felt proud that Weller and Forman embraced the raw materials they provided, and tried to make Hair the best version of itself it could be.

We should all be glad they did.

Unrated is overrated

I've never bought into the shameless marketing of unrated versions of dumb comedies. I think the idea excited me for about a week-and-a-half back in 2001, or whenever the concept was introduced. And then I remembered I'm an adult, and the internet is full of pornography if I'm so inclined.

So I never, ever watch the unrated version. It's not only because I don't need to be titillated by two extra boob shots per movie. More than anything, it's because I hold the strong belief that there should be one definitive version of every movie out there. In trying to explain this view to those who don't already agree with it, I use the art world as a metaphor. When the Mona Lisa was done, it was done, and no one later decided that she should be holding a walkie talkie instead of a gun, or that Michelangelo's David would shoot first. So I don't like director's cuts of movies, and rarely watch them even as a curiosity. If I don't even want to give the director the chance to show me his/her true vision, it should stand to reason I don't care for the marketing department's true vision -- a vision concocted to goose DVD sales to horny teenagers.

But this blog is about scientific inquiry. So in the name of science, I decided to watch the unrated version of Miss March last night, to see what all the supposed fuss was about.

I had been sort of wanting to see Miss March since I first saw the trailers, and I have a movie called Sex Drive to blame for that. A friend and I went to see Sex Drive last fall, expecting something mindless that might have a few laughs (and, let's be honest, a few boobs). Well, it had more than a few laughs, and we were surprised by how charming it actually was. A worthy modern-day successor to a wide range of influential movies, from The Sure Thing to American Pie. Miss March -- about a high school senior who goes into a four-year coma right as he's about to lose his virginity, and discovers upon waking that his previously abstinent girlfriend has become a Playboy centerfold -- seemed to have that same kind of vibe.

It didn't take long for me to hear that Miss March was terrible, and for it to drop off my short-term radar. Then yesterday, seeing it on the shelf at Blockbuster reminded me of that flicker of interest. Certain that this was not a Mona Lisa whose purity could be tainted by an unrated version, I decided to make Miss March the subject in my experiment.

And just how hard is the marketing department pushing this unrated version? Well, let's look at the cover. Not only is there that band wrapped around the supposedly naked body of actress Raquel Alessi (who never gets naked in the film), but there's the GIANT word "UNRATED" emblazoned across, twice the size of the title, and "FULLY EXPOSED EDITION" in only slightly more modest print underneath. And there's more text -- also capitalized, but I'll spare your eyes: "Do not open near wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, boss, grandparents, babysitter, clergy, etc." (True enough, I did watch it on a night my wife was out of town, but mostly because I knew she wouldn't have any interest in sitting through it.) According to the marketing department, this is the hottest movie you are ever going to see.

I have a different theory. My theory is, the only truth in advertising about the word "UNRATED" is this: They literally did not submit it to the MPAA to be rated. Which is of course true, because the MPAA only rates the version intended for theatrical release. Any secondary version of a film can, therefore, accurately be listed as "unrated" -- in fact, you might almost say it must be listed that way. The makers of Miss March want you to believe that this was the version submitted to the MPAA, but that it would have been slapped with an NC-17, so they had to edit it down to an R if they wanted anybody to see it. There may be one or two movies out there where this is actually the case, but the majority of the time, the unrated version gets conceived after the fact -- or at the very least, footage is shot with full knowledge that it will be saved for the unrated DVD release. By this strict definition of "unrated," the unrated version could theoretically be cleaner than the theatrical version. The only way you would know would be to compare the two.

And the makers of Miss March are banking on the fact that you won't. They believe most consumers lured in by the DVD's promises will watch the unrated version only. Perhaps it's even more self-deprecating than that. Perhaps they realized that the movie is crap, so regardless of which version you watch, it'll be the only one.

Well, not me. I wanted to see exactly which parts they considered too hot to include in the R version -- if any at all. I wanted to hold them accountable to their warnings of "full exposure."

But I didn't want to watch the damn thing twice. Even the pursuit of science has demands that are just too unreasonable.

So I decided I would watch the unrated version, identify scenes I thought might be too hot/vulgar for the theatrical version, then watch the theatrical version on fast forward, slowing down only during the passages under examination. Having just seen the movie, I hoped I'd be able to note any major differences even at five times the speed.

Here's what I came up with, using my notes as title headings (Some spoilers to follow, if you really care):

1) Crackheads. Near the beginning of the movie, the future centerfold (Raquel Alessi) and her pre-comatose boyfriend (Zach Cregger, who also co-directed and co-wrote) are giving a "scared straight" speech to an auditorium full of elementary school kids. Their warped idea of how to promote abstinence involves telling the kids that because so-and-so smoked cigarettes, her baby "came out a crackhead." Except Alessi's mouth is not saying the word "crackhead." That was dubbed in later. I doubted they would go to the trouble of dubbing in crude dialogue just to make the movie more racy, especially since "crackhead" is not the kind of word that gets ratings boards in a tizzy. It wouldn't be worth it to undermine yourself technically -- it's easy to see the lips don't match up, and I was only half watching. But I saw no other explanation for it.

Verdict: The word is dubbed in the theatrical version as well. In fact, all three times she references the crack baby, it's dubbed. I'm no lip reader, but I'm now pretty sure the actual line of dialogue was "her baby came out retarded." An 11th hour save on being politically correct, but do Cregger and his co-writer/co-director/co-star Trevor Moore lose points for filming it the "wrong way" in the first place?

2) Spooge on limo. The limo picking up the two abstinence-lovers for the prom already has three occupants: A budding rapper (played by The Office's Craig Robinson) named Horsedick.mpeg (a sort of funny joke that gets run into the ground), and his two "bitches." As the abstinent couple gets their picture taken by her parents outside the house, one of the "bitches" springs out through the sun roof and spits up what appears to be a mouthful of semen. "Horsedick, you nasty," she says.

Verdict: Also in the theatrical version. Semen hasn't been off limits since There's Something About Mary, though expectorating it on a car roof might have been pushing the envelope. Still, the semen and the accompanying fellatio implications were deemed acceptable for an R.

3) Hospital shit. When Eugene (let's give this guy a name) awakens from his coma -- courtesy of a baseball bat to the head by his brilliant friend Tucker (Moore) -- he falls out of the hospital bed in his confusion. Moments later, while exerting to stand up but not yet having control of his bowels, he releases what can only be described as a "shit bomb" from underneath his hospital gown. The effect is quite good -- the shit looks like a believable mixture of chunks and liquid, and cascades outward in a way resembling a tossed bucket of dirty water. And though gross-out gags are a bit played out, the ick factor really worked for me on this one.

Verdict: You guessed it -- also in the theatrical version. I wasn't surprised that this was okay for an R. In fact, I was hopeful that it wasn't exclusive to the unrated version -- if it had been, it would have been a good visual gag that I would have missed if I'd stuck to my usual viewing philosophy.

4) Straw dick. Given the way sexual braggarts always get their comeuppance in movies like this, we shouldn't be surprised that the suggestively named Horsedick.meg turns out not to have a dick at all. In the big finale outside the Playboy Mansion, he's outed as a guy born without genitalia, who has to "piss through a straw." Several members of his shocked posse then grab him and pull his pants down, at which point we see what looks like balls with two thin straws protruding, about the thickness of the kind you use to stir your coffee. To make matters more gross, some actual urine spurts out the end. (And how's this for a continuity error -- there's no way that girl could have spit out Horsedick's semen in the limo if he didn't have a penis.)

Verdict: Last but not least, this was also in the theatrical version. If a movie like Miss March doesn't have jokes like this, what does it have?

So all four potentially sketchy scenes I identified were in both versions of the film. For a moment I was delighted by the outrageous possibility that the unrated version and the theatrical version might be exactly the same. What better validation of my skepticism could there be?

Yet when I compared the running times, the unrated version was a full three-and-a-half minutes longer: 93:26 compared to 89:53. Just where were those extra 213 seconds?

I couldn't find them all, but I did account for the difference in some ways:

1) Grotto. Having made it to his personal Shangri-La, Tucker stumbles across the grotto at the Playboy Mansion. In the theatrical version, it's basically just a wide shot where you see a nude woman diving into the water from far away. In the unrated version, the difference is exactly those two boob shots that I mentioned at the start -- just two quick cutaways of topless women. Yawn.

2) Lesbian scene. The least surprising thing in Miss March is that a hitchhiking Eugene and Tucker get picked up by a pair of attractive European lesbians who can't stop pawing each other. In fact, they ask the two guys to drive so they can go at it in the backseat. This scene is pretty chaste in both versions, in terms of actual nudity -- there's a nipple quickly flashed here and there -- but in the unrated version, there's the introduction of a bottle into their love-making. I didn't really consider this very risque -- all she does is hold up a bottle and then lower it out of view -- so I didn't write it down the first time. But on fast forward I thought it might have been missing from the theatrical version. Then again, maybe not. I couldn't be bothered to slow down enough to examine it closely.

3) A different ending. And here is where my big fear of alternate versions really comes into play. See, I liked the ending they chose for the unrated version better. In the unrated version, after reuniting with his lost love, Eugene unwittingly gets drunk again, with Tucker as his personal bartender, right before going to finally consummate his relationship. It was this drunkenness after the prom that caused him to fall down the stairs and land in a four-year coma, so history looks like it will repeat itself. In the unrated version, we then see him upstairs in a bedroom with Cindi (let's give her a name), pounding away at high speed as only a drunk rookie might do. It's a little crass but it is otherwise pretty chaste -- the sheets cover them up. As he is approaching climax, Cindi warns him not to over-exert himself, but it's too late -- we hear a juicy release of feces, and the credits roll. That's gross as hell, but it works -- gives literal meaning to the colorful metaphor "he shat the bed." Besides, it brings back a recurring joke -- it's Eugene's fourth involuntary shit of the movie -- and that's always a smart move in the closing scene of a comedy.

In the theatrical version, however, they shied away from the bed-shitting joke. Could that really have been too gross for the MPAA? You don't see the shit, you only hear it. So instead, the movie ends with Tucker and Eugene each slamming down a shot glass on the kitchen counter. In other words, it doesn't even end with a joke. No wonder no one liked this movie.

In the final analysis, I didn't like it much either -- regardless of the version. But it's not the worst piece of shit I've ever seen, either.

I can say that Hugh Hefner, who makes an extended cameo here, chose a better product tie-in movie with last year's The House Bunny. Not only was that movie both funnier and sweeter, but it has only one version, which happens to be rated PG-13 -- meaning it can be plenty winning without torrents of feces and semen.

The controversy or the egg

I was perusing the movies in the checkout line at the grocery store tonight. Usually they are totally random movies -- I can remember seeing The Gods Must Be Crazy 2 in one such line not too long ago. Tonight, though, had a slightly more current -- and in my view, higher quality -- selection.

You see, I was a fan of I Am Legend. I know not everybody was -- they couldn't shake the Will Smithishness of such scenes as when Smith's character meets another human for the first time in several years, and goes pretty much immediately into a bit about Bob Marley. Me, I didn't mind.

To get those skeptics, the distributors of this DVD advertised it as containing an "alternate theatrical version" with a "controversial ending."

From a purely semantic standpoint, I saw two problems with these claims:

1) You can call something an "alternate version," but you are getting into pants-on-fire territory if you add in the adjective "theatrical." Unless there were actually two versions going around in theaters -- and potential viewers had to ask if the 4:55 screening was Ending 1 or Ending 2 -- then you are talking about an alternate video version, not an alternate theatrical version.

2) If this is the first time this ending is being seen by anybody, can it really be "controversial" yet? Isn't controversy something that's born of a common awareness among like-minded individuals who might be inspired to argue about the topic in question? If you suspect it will be controversial, that's not the same as it actually being controversial.

(Confession: This post was primarily to show you that I can do short in addition to long. Please come back. I'm new at this.)