The Following Film Has Been Edited For Television

I watched American Pie 2 on Indian tv this weekend. Kind of a sad way to spend my first weekend in Mumbai, but don't fret. I got out and saw the sights and got the sunburn. Last night I was just feeling a little worn out so I flipped on the set and there it was. I've seen it a few times already, so it was like a comfortable old friend. Just what I needed.

The interesting part was the way it was edited for tv over here. Parts of the movie I thought mostly harmless were completely cut out. Some of the more outrageous stuff made it through without a single trim. Occasionally, throughout the movie, a banner would scroll across the bottom of the screen telling you where to write and complain if something in the movie offended you.

The real mystery to me was how they handled the language. The f word was right out. No bleeps, jut cut out of the dialog. So were a few other words that would seem to be pretty obvious choices. The word that confused me was 'shit'. It's used in movies a lot these days from PG films on up to NC17 and beyond. There is a veritable fountain of shit pouring from the mouths of Hollywood's actors. Take that as you will.

When they broadcast American films in English here they subtitle them, which makes sense. But they subtitle them in English, which doesn't really makes sense to me, but whatever. This is where more editing comes in, albeit a different, and to my mind, bizarre form of editing. They replace some words in the subtitles. Not in the actual dialog, mind you, just in the subtitles. An onscreen damn becomes darn in the subtitles. Shit becomes crap. In the American Pie movies every tenth work is shit, so that's a lot of crap.

Now we finally come to the point. One of the characters in the movie is occasionally referred to as Shitbrick. How did they handle it in the subtitles? Wrong! They used Shitbrick. Wha-? I had always thought of it as two words, but they wrote it as one here and capitalized it, so that's what I'm going with. And maybe that's why they got away with it. Because it's used as a name instead of a swear word. I dunno. All I can say is, the next time I'm watching a movie in the US and I'm trying to fathom how the hell the MPAA came up with the rating, I'll just think of Shitbrick and smile.