“It just feels good knowing that you can watch great Hollywood movies without having to worry about the profanity, nudity and gory violence,” says the ClearPlay home page here.
The company has decided to cash in on the fact that much (most?) of the content routinely pumped out by Hollywood is full of totally gratuitous violence, totally gratuitous scenes of people having each other away in close-up with full audio, totally gratuitous filthy language, and et cetera.
Normal Hollywood ‘product’, in other words.
Orrin Hatch, Diane Feinstein, Howard Berman, Lamar Smith, Patrick Leahy and the many other Hollywood supporters of their ilk spend a lot of US tax-payer time attacking p2p networks, claiming they [the networks] open children to pornography.
And yet they find Hollywood movies perfectly acceptable.
ClearPlay’s “staff of movie professionals” go through “individual movies and identify content which may have contributed to a movie’s PG-13 or R rating. The content they identify generally falls under the categories of graphic violence, sexual content, and language.”
The Passion of the Christ is, for example, OK (extreme blood and hard-core sadism in every frame) and Schindler’s List (a wonderful historical piece, but shocking in its portrayal of horrors perpetrated under the Nazi regime) and they won’t be altered, writes Claudia Puig in her USA TODAY story here.
But, says ClearPlay, it had to prune movies such as American Splendor, Big Fish, Cat in the Hat, The Haunted Mansion, The Last Samurai, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Master And Commander, The School of Rock, Timeline and Win A Date With Tad Hamilton.
Puig isn’t very impressed with ClearPlay’s technique saying, “too often, the cuts are clunky, eliminating portions of sentences and leaving only dead air, or speeding over objectionable items so they emerge almost as ‘blips.’ The awkward presentation could backfire as a way to sanitize mass entertainment and make it palatable for family audiences. Plus, the cuts are so obvious they could pique the curiosity of young minds. Sometimes a vivid imagination can be worse than the reality.”
Maybe the for-a-fee-censors will get better as they go along.
However, the fact the company is able to enter the market at all with a product such as this raises a Big question – and it’s not whether or not you want to pay someone to sanitize your movies.
Rather, what’s really at issue is the fact that on the one hand, the entertainment industry is ripping into p2p file sharing and file sharers as if they’re the greatest evil the world has ever known, incorrectly claiming that p2p apps are filling the cyberwaves with porn …
… while on the other, Hollywood (the common name for the major movie studios, recording labels and hardware and software manufacturers) daily pumps out more filth than the world has ever seen before – and gets away with it.
