News You Can Bruise for 2014 October 6 (entry 0)

Mon Oct 06 2014 10:09 September Film Roundup: A whopping two films this month, at best. October's also not looking great. For movies, I mean. Everything else looks pretty good.

• Rebecca (1940): I don't even remember when I saw this, it probably wasn't September, but I'm 'reviewing' it here so that there's more than one film in this month's roundup. I was reminded of it when Sumana showed me the Mitchell and Webb parody. The parody will also serve as my review. It's a dull, super-melodramatic movie, and the best part is the scene where the maid is really creepily going through Rebecca's old clothes, a scene that's also in the parody, so why watch the movie?

  After this and Vertigo and Rear Window I'm downgrading Hitchcock from "brilliant with occasional lapses" to "above average with extremely high variance". But let's remember the good times. The Strangers on a Train, the Shadow of a Doubt, the Psycho, the North by Northwest, even the The Birds.

• The Jerk (1979): I recommend this thoroughly funny movie. Now for the real point of this review. I saw this with Sumana on cable many years ago and I'd always wanted to rewatch it because there were a couple scenes which cut off really abruptly. The only explanation we could come up with was that the movie had been edited for cable. But what had been cut? The question gnawed at me for years without inconveniencing me in any way.

  Here's the answer, near as I can tell: they cut every mention of the tattoo on Patty's ass. This movie has sex, racial slurs, every curse word in a slightly abridged edition of "the book", and comic mischief, but whoever edited it for cable thought we couldn't handle discussion of an ass tattoo. Not the tattoo itself, which we never see, but people talking about it. It squiggles the mind.