I TiVoed 48 Hours, a movie I liked in theaters, off American Movie Classics and I'm watching it at the moment. Sort of watching it, at least. I forgot when I marked it for recording that A.M.C. has become a pretty awful place to watch movies, what with commercial interruptions and films being "cleaned up" for broadcast. There's a great line in the movie and I need to describe the context. The bad guy, who is stark-raving homicidal crazy, kills a couple of policemen. A hooker who was with him is hauled in for questioning and she warns that the authorities will have a hard time dealing with this fellow. She says, "I just think he likes shooting cops a lot more than getting laid."
The line was redubbed on AMC and badly — not in sync and apparently not by the same actress. Her voice changes noticeably and her lips do not match the words as she now says, "I just think he likes shooting cops a lot more than women."
Uh, that isn't the same thing. I mean, there are two ways to parse that sentence but neither of them mean quite what the original line meant. As altered, it could mean the guy would rather shoot a cop than shoot a woman. Or it could mean he likes shooting cops more than women like shooting cops. But it doesn't mean he'd rather shoot a cop than have sex with a woman, which is what the line has to denote for it to have any meaning. The rewritten line doesn't even have the same number of syllables, which is the first thing you try to match when you rewrite dialogue for looping purposes.
The obvious substitution would have been to swap out "getting laid" for "having sex" or even "making love." Same number of syllables, same rhythm of delivery. Why didn't they? As I'm watching now, I hear obvious bleeps and redubs all over the place, and they've also reinserted a number of scenes that I'm pretty sure were out when it was first released, which probably means that after they made all their deletions, someone decided the film was too short.
Moaning about this isn't going to change anything, of course. I'm just wondering how long it's going to be before home video and unaltered cable broadcasts get America so used to uncut films that they won't tolerate anything less. I'd have thought we'd be there by now.