The Robber Surfaces

The Robber, one of the better movies I saw at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival (and one that I certainly did not expect to get a U.S. theatrical release), is opening this week in New York City theaters.  I’m not sure if it will expand to other cities in the coming weeks, but if you discover it playing near you, it’s well worth catching.  If you’re not sure if it’s for you, you can check out my review of the film here.

Hanna (2011)

Hanna has been marketed as a cross between an art house film and an action flick.  While the film definitely boasts a more interesting and eclectic cast than most action movies, it eventually does nothing more than borrow bits and pieces from The Bourne Identity, Run Lola Run, and Léon.  This lack of originality doesn’t keep it from being an effective movie, but anyone looking for something new while getting their action fix may be disappointed.

Saoirse Ronan plays the titular character, a teenager who has been raised by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), in the frozen wasteland of the Arctic Circle.  They live in a cabin with no  modern conveniences, surviving by hunting for food and making clothes out of animal skins.  Erik not only teaches Hanna how to hunt, but also how to fight with any number of weapons and how to speak several different languages.  What he doesn’t teach her is how to interact with people like a normal teenaged girl would.

Deciding that her training is complete, Erik lets Hanna trigger a radio device that leads a team of CIA commandos to their cabin.  As part of a plan that’s not nearly as twisty as everyone in the film seems to think, Erik slips out before the commandos arrive, allowing them to find Hanna and take her into custody.  But the commandos weren’t looking for Hanna.  They were looking for Erik, who turns out to be a former CIA agent, believed to have killed his girlfriend–Hanna’s mother–before disappearing over a decade earlier.

The commando team takes Hanna to a highly classified facility where a CIA agent named Marissa (Cate Blanchett) eagerly awaits her arrival.  It seems that Marissa was Erik’s handler before he went rogue and his reappearance has shaken her.  But she takes a special interest in Hanna’s existence.  While scientists do blood tests on her, Hanna is interviewed by a psychiatrist as Marissa watches via video.  When Hanna specifically asks to speak to Marissa by name, another agent, wearing a wig to help her match Marissa’s general appearance, enters the room.  Before anyone can react, Hanna has broken the impostor’s neck, shot several guards and escaped from the facility.

So begins an international chase, as Hanna, who believes she has completed her mission to kill Marissa, makes her way across Morocco and Europe to meet up with Erik in Berlin.  But hot on her trail is Marissa and a hired goon (Tom Hollander) who is able to do unsavory things the CIA won’t allow Marissa to do in her pursuit.  But why does Marissa have such an obsession with catching up to Erik and Hanna while keeping her superiors in the dark?  Why were the lab technicians surprised and confused by Hanna’s test results?  And why does Erik want Marissa killed so badly that he would raise and train his daughter for this one specific purpose?  All of these questions are eventually answered, but the answers are so basic and unimaginative that they suck some of the momentum out of the film during a third act that should be alive with excitement and suspense.

The director, Joe Wright, is known more for Oscar-bait films like Atonement and one of the approximately five thousand adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.  While he does a more than commendable job with the action beats in Hanna, he fails to cover up some of the more glaring plot and character holes in the screenplay by Seth Lockhead and David Farr.

The character of Hanna, in particular, is a mess of contradictions.  In one scene, she is confused and frightened by such mundane modern conveniences as a ceiling fan and a television, in another scene, roughly forty minutes later, she is expertly navigating the Internet.  This change is supposed to be explained away by a mantra that Erik drills into her head: “Adapt or die.”  But we never get to see the actual adaptation process.  How does Hanna even know what the Internet is, much less know to go to an Internet cafe and teach herself how to use it?  Yes, she is supposed to be a supremely intelligent girl, but it feels like a cheat that the audience is expected to accept that she’s smart, so she just knows the Internet exists and she can extract information from it.  It’s a frustrating bit that pulled me out of the movie and could have very easily been explained if Wright would just take the thirty-seconds needed to show Hanna observing other people using the Internet.

Unfortunately, the script also relies on the annoying ploy to have characters act dumber than they are to move the action along.  Erik is shown time and again to be intelligent and paranoid, allowing him to avoid capture.  When he is confronted by various bad guys, he displays a ruthlessness and ability to improvise that tell us more about his character than any of the flashbacks Wright uses to flesh out the tragic backstory that links Erik and Hanna’s mother to Marissa.  But then his character makes several monumental mistakes in the third act that are completely out of character.  Simply put: Erik is turned into a bumbling idiot to move the plot in the direction of its foregone climax.

Even more annoying is the attempt by Wright to frame the movie as a twisted fairy tale.  The only fiction book that Hanna has read is a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the climax of the film takes place in an abandoned Brothers Grimm-themed amusement park.  This leads to several forced metaphors turning Marissa alternately into the wicked witch, an evil stepmother, and the Big Bad Wolf (although this aspect of her personality is presented in a clever visual gag as the dental hygiene-obsessed Marissa uses a magnifying mirror to check her teeth after brushing and flossing until her gums bleed).  But if Marissa is supposed to represent the evil antagonist and Hanna is the little girl lost in the woods, what role does Erik embody?  Is he the ineffectual father figure who is easily duped by the evil stepmother?  If so, this description is the exact opposite of the paranoid and dangerous Erik.

But attempts to tell a modern, violent fairy tale are swept aside as the film hits every predictable action beat.  The fact that it delivers on the action front despite Wright’s fumbling of the characters is actually impressive.  Much of this success is due to the driving score by The Chemical Brothers and Ronan’s endearing, heartfelt performance.  It’s hard to think of another young actress who could have so believably expressed the horror and confusion that she displays in the film.  Without her, the already glaring problems would have been magnified to an inexcusable level.

Despite all my complaints, it’s hard not to like Hanna as just a simple action film.  If Wright had played the the proceedings as a straight up revenge flick, I probably would have liked it quite a bit more just because of Ronan’s performance.  But the pretentious sheen he brings to the film actually holds it back and raises expectations to a level that the simple script is unable to match.  Sometimes an action film really is just an action film.  Such is the case with Hanna.

Super (2011)

Super is the type of movie that thrills me by its very existence.  It’s a whacked-out burst of intelligent, inventive filmmaking that does a great job of juggling wildly shifting tones while never forgetting where the heart of its story rests.  I watched the film with a huge smile on my face as writer-director James Gunn weaved a tale of violence, sex, drugs, and psychosis around a touching and sad performance by Rainn Wilson.  But as the film went on, I experienced a horrific feeling of helplessness and frustration that makes me want to repeatedly punch Gunn in the face.

But I should give the film a proper review before I enter into the sticky personal reasons why I want to introduce my fist to the side of Mr. Gunn’s head.

Frank (Wilson) is an awkward loser.  He works a dead-end job as a cook at a greasy diner in an economically depressed city.  He knows he’s a loser.  As the film opens, he explains through voiceover narration that he has had two moments of true happiness in his life: the first was when he married his wife, Sarah (Liv Tyler), and the second was when he pointed out where a criminal went to a police officer.

But Frank is slowly losing Sarah and he knows it.  When she leaves him for scummy drug dealer, Jacques (Kevin Bacon), Frank isn’t surprised, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not angry.  Unfortunately for everyone involved, Frank turns out to be more than a socially awkward schlub–he’s actually a mentally unstable giant who is prone to intense hallucinations.  When these traits are mixed with the pain and anger he feels from Sarah’s rejection, he quickly goes off the deep end.

Taking his latest hallucination (which is rendered through striking and grotesque special effects) to be God speaking to him, Frank takes inspiration from a Christian television superhero named The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion) and fashions himself a homemade costume.  Calling himself “The Crimson Bolt,” Frank starts fighting crime in a brutal style that finds him flinging himself at drug dealers and thieves before caving in their skulls with a pipe wrench.  As he works toward an eventual clash with Jacques and his goons (Michael Rooker, Sean Gunn, and Stephen Blackehart), Frank reluctantly picks up a sidekick in Libby (Ellen Page), a foul-mouthed employee at a comic book store with a passion for ultra-violence and a libido to match.

Super may sound like a comedy, but to describe it simply as such is to do it a disservice.  To be sure, it is very funny in places.  But Gunn does a smart thing and never makes fun of Frank as a human being.  Some of the things that happen to him are funny in a mean, life is truly unfair sort of way.  And while his reactions to events can be amusing to the viewer, given the context of the film, they’re never funny to Frank.  Frank is really a tragic character.  A doughy, odd-looking man with a damaged psyche, he’s a character who should be pitied, even as he descends so far into madness that he escalates the violence to fatal levels.

Wilson helps this portrayal by leaving his persona from The Office behind and playing Frank straight.  He’s a man going through severe psychological pain who finally snaps.  There’s nothing funny in that description and Wilson goes for and achieves a sad, heartbreaking tone that grounds the film’s sometimes outlandish plot twists in a realistic central character who is as damaged a human being as I’ve seen put on screen in years.  But thankfully, he’s also not just a complete sad-sack.  Frank is self-aware enough to know that he’s on the wrong side of the law and his initial resistance to Libby joining him as his sidekick elicits some nicely constructed comic dialogue that Wilson delivers in a perfectly wry sense of humor.

The rest of the cast shapes up quite nicely.  Gunn is either the most well-liked man in Hollywood or the most effective salesman to pull together such a deep cast.  Fillion and Rooker are veterans of Gunn’s brilliant Slither.  As is Gregg Henry who shows up as an ineffective cop who has dealings with Frank.  But add to this already impressive line up Page, Linda Cardellini (in a throwaway cameo), Andre Royo (Bubbles!), Bacon, and Tyler and you get a talented cast that would put most major studio productions to shame.  Even more impressive is that they all do great work that elevates the occasionally thin characters.  Rooker, Page, and Bacon, in particular, help prop up the film through a second act that occasionally lacks forward momentum.

Gunn has talked openly about Super being more of a reaction to comic books than to films based on comics.  Not being a comic book guy, I have to take him at his word on this point.  But for non-comic book nerds like myself, the film works just fine as a vigilante/revenge film that coasts in and out of surreal territory.

While successful, it quickly becomes obvious that Jacques is kind of an idiot.  This idiocy doesn’t make him any less dangerous, but it does make him the perfect villain for Frank to go up against.  These are two violent men who are successful at what they do–often through sheer luck and ignorance of the consequences of their actions.  Their conflict builds to unexpected heights as the body count ramps up in the third act, leading to several gasp-inducing moments of graphic, bloody violence that is only slightly lessened by Gunn’s use of comic book graphics.

The film isn’t without problems: The subplot with Frank and the cop eventually goes nowhere; as a character, Libby is all over the place before Gunn and Page finally settle on playing her as a giddy sociopath; an implied moral conflict for Abe (Rooker), Jacques’ main henchman, is never developed beyond him shooting some disgusted looks toward his boss.

But for the few moments that fail to work, there are many great scenes, characters, and plot twists that do: the flashbacks set to Cheap Trick’s If  You Want My Love that show the desperation that drove Frank and Sarah together; a comedic montage that has Frank and Libby acting like kids in a candy store as they shop for weapons; the vision Frank has of God literally opening up his skull to plant an idea in his brain; the true horror of Sarah’s drug addiction.  It’s a miracle that these disparate moments and the wild tonal shifts they bring not only work, but push the film past a simple comedy/action exercise into emotionally effecting territory.

But if there’s one reason above all others to see Super, it’s to support a great movie that the studio system would never produce.  Gunn produced the film independently, on the cheap.  If it’s not playing at a theater near you, you can catch it on demand.  For everyone out there who is sick of the unoriginal drivel that the studio system is cranking out, you won’t find a more exciting movie than Super.

Okay, the review portion of this post is over.  Before I get into why I seemingly want to challenge Gunn to a bare-knuckle boxing match, I do want to address the grumblings I’ve heard that Super is nothing but a knockoff of last year’s Kick-Ass.

Beyond the basic idea of a person with no superpowers donning a homemade costume to fight crime, these two films diverge wildly in both plot and tone.  While Kick-Ass started out in a real world environment, it quickly turned into a straightforward–if excessively violent–comic book movie with the main character gaining a superpower in the inability to feel pain and the introduction of the characters of Hit Girl and Big Daddy.  Super, for all the absurdities it piles on, tries to stay grounded in the real world.  Frank never gains a superpower, the violence is never played for laughs, and the sticky moral questions it raises are not ignored.  I really enjoyed Kick-Ass.  I thought it was a thoroughly entertaining bit of escapist entertainment.  But Super aims higher, giving a sometimes uncomfortable look into the darkness that would drive a man to pick up a pipe wrench and start bashing in skulls.  Yes, it has some laughs, but Gunn is playing the material in a much more uncomfortable tone that makes the audience question whether they should be enjoying the mayhem.  That’s a pretty impressive feat for a man who got his start writing movies for Troma.

So if I love Super so much, why do I want to go all Crimson Bolt on James Gunn?

Roughly one year ago, I finished work on a spec script that I consider to be the best thing I’ve ever written.  Since I’m my harshest critic, the fact that I can still read through this script and love it, is saying something.  I wrote it more as a writing sample than anything else.  It’s a satire that skips from one genre to the next with abandon–a thriller that turns into a romantic comedy before taking a left turn into horror and finally landing firmly in dark character study territory, it’s not exactly mainstream material.  But it’s a damn good script and I’m very proud of it.

Aside from falling in love with two of the most fleshed-out, complicated characters I’ve ever managed to create, I was taken with the script’s originality.  Of course, there’s no such thing as a truly original story and my script definitely reflected elements of other films, but I had never seen these elements put together in such an ambitious, playful manner.  And then I saw Super.

Through the first act of Super, I was thoroughly entertained by and engrossed in the story.  It wasn’t until certain plot points and character motivations in the second act that I began to notice similarities between Gunn’s script and my own.  By the time a major plot twist occurs in the third act, I felt like I was watching a somewhat altered, but still recognizable adaptation of my script.

I want to make this very clear: I do NOT think Gunn ripped off my script.  I know that his script has been floating around for several years.  Outside of the readers employed by the Nicholl Fellowship competition and a few literary managers and production companies that asked to read it, my script has not exactly made the rounds in Hollywood.  At the same time, I want to be clear that I had never read or heard of Gunn’s script when I wrote mine.

Granted, there are several differences: my script does not kick off with the idea of a man trying to become a superhero, my main character is not as outwardly insane, my main character does not exclusively target criminals, and my script eventually goes to much darker places.  Perhaps the biggest difference between my script and Gunn’s script for Super is what we’re each targeting: Gunn’s script is going after comic books while mine eventually reveals itself to be a satire of quirky, independent film clichés.

I suppose I should quit worrying.  After all, the truly original stories are few and far between.  The difference between stories that feel unique and stories that feel old and tired is how they’re handled.  The fact that Gunn made something that feels unique and dangerous should be applauded.  That he was able to get it released into theaters is worth celebrating.

Could The New Superman Movie Actually Be Good?

I just became interested in the new Superman movie.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Michael Shannon has been cast to play General Zod.  I’m not a comic book guy at all, so I can’t tell you how the character fits into the world of Superman.  I have a vague memory of Terence Stamp playing the same character in the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films, but I haven’t seen either of those since I was in the second grade, so all I remember is that Zod was also from Krypton and was sort of the evil version of Superman, with the same powers.

But this casting thrills me.  Over the last few years, Shannon has emerged as one of my favorite working actors.  I suppose most people are familiar with him from Revolutionary Road or Boardwalk Empire.  I first noticed him in William Friedkin’s Bug.  Shannon was close to a perfect fit in his role of a man whose intense paranoia sends him off the deep end.  That same year, he nailed a great, two-scene role in Sidney Lumet’s final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  What struck me about him in the that film was how I had the same feeling that he was perfectly cast, even though the smalltime thug he was playing was a completely different type of character than he played in Bug.

A couple of years ago, he snagged the lead role in a tiny-budgeted indie called Shotgun Stories.  A melodrama about a rural family feud, it was one of my top films of 2008.  If you haven’t seen it, drop what you’re doing and rent it because it’s an amazing piece of work.  And most of its success has to do with Shannon.  He’s a magnetic performer without going to great lengths to draw attention to himself.  He has a screen presence that all great movie stars possess.  This intangible quality is even more impressive when you consider the fact that he lacks movie star good looks.  He’s a great actor who commands attention because of his ability to display a truly conflicted soul in just about everything he takes on, lending menace to good guys and humanity to bad guys.

He’s not infallible.  He’s appeared in a lot of crap (Jonah Hex, Let’s Go to Prison), but so have a lot of talented actors.  But I never anticipated the new Superman film to be crap.  At best, I expected it to be a fun action flick.  At worst, I assumed it would be a bloated blockbuster with a ton of special effects and a barely there story that remained watchable.  But now I have expectations.  I am impressed with the supporting cast that Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan have put together (Kevin Costner, Amy Adams, Diane Lane) to this point.  And now that Shannon has joined the cast, I can’t help but feel there could be something more impressive brewing than I anticipated.

I have just set myself up for massive disappointment.

Sidney Lumet, 1924-2011

Sidney Lumet, maybe the greatest American filmmaker of the second half of the 20th century, has died at the age of 86.

I won’t even try to write an obituary for such a brilliant director.  For those of you interested or who need a primer on his life and work, the New York Times has an obit that covers the bases fairly well.

He was the man behind some of my favorite movies of all time: Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, 12 Angry Men, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, and the prophetic work of genius that is Network.

For anyone who is a fan of smart, angry, and subversive filmmaking, Lumet’s passing should be seen as a great loss.

 

The Cohen Case Files: Body Snatchers (1993)

Screen Story by Larry Cohen

How many film adaptations of Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers are needed?  By the time Body Snatchers was released in 1993 (after sitting on the shelf for roughly two years), there had been two official adaptations and numerous films that had taken inspiration (ripped off) from Finney’s yarn about alien pod people taking over the human race.  But surely, you ask, can’t a film that combines the cult sensibilities of Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, and Abel Ferrara put a new spin on this old tale?  Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Steve (Terry Kinney) is chemist for the EPA who is sent to a Southern military base to investigate the containment methods of toxic chemicals being stored there.  Planning to be on the base for a full summer, he drags along his family: Carol (Meg Tilly) is the slightly kooky wife; Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) is the sullen teenager still nursing a grudge with Steve for marrying Carol after the death of her mother; and Andy (Reilly Murphy) is the cute little kid.

Once settled in on the base, Steve finds a distrustful commander (R. Lee Ermey) who is operating under the impression that the government wants to remove the chemicals and a paranoid doctor (Forest Whitaker) who is noticing odd changes in behavior from the soldiers.  In the meantime, Marti finds romance with Tim (Billy Wirth), a cocky, yet sensitive (Are there any other kind?) helicopter pilot.  With everything considered, for a film directed by a man known for his intense portrayals of paranoia and moral corruption, the first act is very low-key.

But then Andy finds Carol’s dried-out husk of a corpse in bed before her naked alien double walks out of the closet.  It’s a fair description to say that all hell breaks loose after this point.

Since this is an entry in the Cohen Case Files, I suppose I should tackle the subject of how much of Cohen’s personality exists in the finished film.  Among the labyrinthine writing credits on the film, Cohen is given a co-screen story credit along with Raymond Cistheri.  Finney’s novel is credited as the source material and the final screenwriting credits go to Stuart Gordon, his frequent collaborator, Dennis Paoli, and Ferrara’s frequent writing partner, Nicholas St. John.  It’s no wonder that among this collision of strong styles that pull in opposite directions, the only portion of the film that bears Cohen’s touch is the red herring of whether or not the toxic chemicals on the base have anything to do with the strange behavior.  But this idea is quickly disposed of once alien pods are shown being harvested from a swamp.

Sadly, there’s not much to Body Snatchers that hasn’t been done before.  It’s not a bad film, just a very familiar one.  Ferrara stages a few very effective sequences that evoke the paranoia of being a survivor of the initial takeover, but the story beats never feel original.  This is less a fault of the script and more to do with the fact that the story is so well-known.

Aside from some grotesque sequences that show the gestation of the doubles inside their giant pods, nothing about the story is new or fresh.  Even the idea of grafting the story on to a military setting, equating the military mindset with a hive-mind mentality, feels cheap and perfunctory.

Despite my complaints about the rehashed feel of the material, the film stays watchable.  This is mainly due to Ferrara’s ability to ratchet up tension with not much more than some moody lighting by cinematographer Bojan Bazelli and uniformly good work by the cast.

Speaking of the performances, while they are are all solid, Tilly deserves special recognition for pulling off the best alien point and scream from any movie based on Finney’s novel.  Even though I knew it was coming, it was still a horrifying moment that raised goosebumps.

Clocking in at just over 85 minutes, Body Snatchers is just as long as it needs to be.  It even manages to end on a high note with a ridiculous third act that finds Ferrara indulging in some excessive pyrotechnics as he takes advantage of the biggest budget he ever got his hands on.  It’s just too bad the rest of the movie wasn’t this loopy.  At least it would have been something different instead of just a decent version of the usual plot.

Think of the Children!

Be forewarned, if the MPAA rated this post, it would get an R.

Ah, The King’s Speech, the classy little drama about King George VI (Colin Firth) attempting to overcome a speech impediment in time to symbolically lead Great Britain during World War II (I say symbolically because the King of England hasn’t wielded any real power for several generations, a fact that the film only briefly acknowledges, but I digress).  With a plot description like that, is it any wonder that the film was marketed as Oscar bait?  Is it any shock that it won as many as it did?  The answer to both of those questions is no.  What is surprising, is just how good of a movie it turned out to be.  I expected a stuffy costume drama full of handwringing and Colin Firth forcing a pained stutter to finally grab that Oscar that’s been dangling in his sights for the last few years.  But the film turned out to be full of humor and warmth, only occasionally lapsing into overwrought melodrama.  So why has executive producer Harvey Weinstein chosen to fuck with a film that is so commercially and critically successful?

Because the MPAA ratings board is composed of a bunch of morons.

The King’s Speech was rated R for a scene in which the King is encouraged by his speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) to get angry and let fly with profanity as a way to untie his tongue.  In the course of roughly 15-20 seconds, the King says the word “fuck” somewhere between 10-15 times (unlike the MPAA, I didn’t count the number of uses).  For the record, he also says “shit” and “tits,” but you can say those on basic cable these days, so that’s okay in a movie.  No, the film ran into trouble because it violated the MPAA rule that a film can only use “fuck” two times during its running time before the dreaded R rating is dropped on it like a box office death sentence.

I’ve never been clear if this is an official rule or an implied one that everyone understands and attempts to adhere to, but it doesn’t matter.  All that matters is The King’s Speech could possibly warp the fragile minds of the under-17 crowd that would be able to see it if it had been given a PG-13 rating.

Obviously, this type of thinking is ridiculous for a number of reasons:

1. Most teenagers are not interested in seeing The King’s Speech.  It’s a movie that was made for adults and it was given an adult rating.
2. The use of the word “fuck” is not pervasive throughout the film.  It is only used in that one scene to demonstrate how forcing someone outside their comfort zone or to say something taboo (for the time) could produce a breakthrough.  There’s nothing mean-spirited about it’s usage in the context of the film.
3. There’s absolutely nothing else in the film that could be deemed “offensive” (violence, nudity).

I’m not going to jump on a bandwagon when it comes to doing away with the MPAA.  I think for parents of young children, or easily offended adults, the ratings system works okay as a general guideline.  But the fact that some filmmakers feel the need to censor themselves in order to achieve a more inclusive rating seems ridiculous.

Even more idiotic is the idea that one word, used too many times, immediately makes something unfit for people of a certain age.  Does the MPAA really think teenagers don’t hear and (in most cases) use the word “fuck” on a daily basis?  How does only using the word twice make it better than using it a hundred times?  If anything, repeated usage of the word only lessens its effectiveness–it become less shocking.

But, as always, nothing will change.  The King’s Speech expands in theaters today, with several “fucks” muted out and a shiny, new PG-13 rating.  It will probably pick up quite a bit of extra money (not that it was hurting in that department when it was rated R) at the box office, but only because of the extra screens on which it is showing.  I think Mr. Weinstein is kidding himself if he thinks a group of high schoolers are going to look at their movie choices this weekend and pick the period piece about British royalty now that they can see it (In another digression, when was the last time you actually saw a teenager turned away from buying a ticket to an R-rated movie?) without having a parent accompany them.

Really, this all amounts to a lot of fuss over nothing.  The original cut will be available on DVD soon and it will more than likely be the one that gets played ‘round the clock on cable for the next 20-30 years.  The PG-13 cut (the muted cut?) will play in theaters for a few weeks, probably be included as an extra on the DVD, and will eventually be looked back on as a curiosity piece by film historians.  All this episode really accomplished was to point out how ridiculous the ratings board can be when it comes to splitting hairs.  There were plenty of PG-13 movies last year (Grown Ups, Date Night, How Do You Know) that were less appropriate for teens and children than The King’s Speech.  They were just smart enough to play by the rules and keep their “fucks” to less than three uses.