Well.  It’s official.  100 days of Singapore. Celebrate!  The Asia Adventure continues.  And I’ve got an observation for you:

Watching movies out here, especially re-watching, invites a curious deja vu.  As you watch it all happen again, you find yourself wondering if something is missing.  Like driving past a house in your hometown and wondering if it was that color last time you were around.

The answer is yes.  (That something is missing.  The house?  It wasn’t that color before, and I hate the family that moved in there.)  It’s missing because movies out here are absolutely censored.  There’s a second cutting room floor somewhere out here in the Pacific.

What is censored?  Well, obviously porn is illegal.  I’m not sure what the standards for actual pornography are, and what’s allowed in and what isn’t.  But I’m thinking that Judge Scalia is not the arbitrary decision maker.  Because we might all know what porn is when we see it, but the consistency of the system is seriously confusing me.

They even edited out some of David Bowie!!!

One of my favorite movies, Zoolander, was on.  I was cooking.  My roommate was on the couch – he is on the couch a lot – and we kept on making these hiccuping noises with each censor situation.  He would say something like ‘wait, they just cut this scene!’ and then I would say ‘wait, wasn’t there another sentence there?’ We couldn’t believe that they removed the just-show-the-shoulders make-out scene.  They even cut out the line about the Maori tribesman.

But… you know what is OK?  All of Troy.

You remember that movie?  I know.  I try to block some things out too.

I say this as someone who watched a portion of Troy the other night, shocked at what hadn’t been edited out*.  Because seriously, I was seeing a lot more than just Brad Pitt’s shoulders, coated in baby oil, moving up and down, and I really really did not want to be seeing that.

But I have to tell you, watching the censored version of Inglorious Bastards made that movie a good 30 minutes shorter.  Apparently Team America: World Police is showing.  I guess that’s going to be about 20 minutes long.  I hope that ‘take that, Wolf Blitzer’ stays in the scene.

But other weird things get edited out.  You know how in ‘Zoolander’ the point is to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia?  They edit out the word ‘Malaysia’.  But when one of the characters says – because he is stupid – “Micronesia” they don’t edit it out.

Take that, Micronesia.  You’re not even worth censoring.

*I only watched six minutes.  I don’t actually know if it was censored or not.  I only know that I saw more of Brad Pitt having bad sex involving knives than I ever wanted to see.