Fubarrio Expat Trader

Family Films and Edited Movies

The holidays, and Christmas in particular are always an interesting time for the Expat.

Some miss friends and family, some miss the traditions and the particularities of celebrating ‘back home”.  For me, it’s simply the dreading of trying to find appropriate gifts for friends and family when I am so far away and so out of touch.

Since Uruguay, in particular, makes so little that wouldn’t spoil in shipping, and we are so far away from friends and family the best gifts are those things that can be purchased, and shipped, online.  I also try to put some thought into the gift and not just send a default ‘gift card’.

Among those things that seemed to work, and were generally appreciated in the past, seemed to be movies and DVDs.  For example:

For a couple of years, I bought my parents a subscription to Netflix — the company that lets people in the US build up lists of movies they want to watch and the company sends DVDs via mail, you keep it for as long as you want, then return it via US post in a handy envelope that comes with your DVD.  Basically, DVDs delivered to your door — no late fees.  Yes, I realize if you haven’t been living under a rock or expatriated for the last 5 years you know what netflix is, but I have some international readers where this doesn’t exist – yet.

For a couple of years before this, I bought my parents DVD sets of popular TV shows that I’d enjoyed on cable, like the Sopranos.  They didn’t have HBO and I realized they probably never would and would certainly enjoy the series.  Fortunately, for the rest of the cable challenged world A&E released the Sopranos on basic cable, but the edited version seemed to cut some of the meat out of the story line — nudity was blurred out in the strip club which wasn’t so bad (you get the idea), but some scenes involving some of the more graphic violence, drug use, and colorful language (swearing, cursing, etc) actually effected some of the character development — and some of the edits taking out the swearing take out some of the comedy of the original edit.

For my boy, I bought him the complete set (at the time) of the Star Wars series (less episode 3).  He of course had already watched them in the theater, but loved them so much he could watch the DVDs over and over.  During some family viewing time with him I was subjected to the horror of jar-jar-binks in Episode I, but fortunately was quick enough to so some of my own post production edits by muting that obnoxious character each time he appeared on screen — to my son’s dismay.

For the last couple of holidays my immediate family has agreed that presents are for the children only, following a growing national trend I believe, however, I had some extended family and friends that I also wanted to find a gift for.

The two most challenging families (for me), included my Aunt & Uncle (and their immediate family — LOTS of cousins and nieces and nephews) and my friend who served as best man at my wedding.

The reason is, our immediate interests are so different.  As you have seen, fubarrio, is not one to shy away from talking about, writing or advocating

• Violence, be it graphic or gratuitous,
• Vulgarity – curse words, cussing, colorful language,
• Lewd Behaviour
• Adult Situations
• Sexual Content, or
• General Nastiness.

However, my Aunt, Uncle and their entire family are all Mormons.  They belong to the Church of Latter Day Saints. And, the best man at my wedding — well his whole family is very religious conservative Pentecostal Christians.  When I inevitably absent mindedly curse in front of them, I can see their ears curly up inside their heads.

Well, both of these families have been taught that exposing themselves and their families to R-rated — and even PG-13 rated films is bad for their spiritual energy….in short something to be avoided.

I remember hanging out with my friend and his wife in my boring hometown where there is nothing to do but rent videos on a Friday night.  We’d go to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video to rent film and looking at the stacks of DVDs….His wife would invariably recommend a light hearted comedy or family oriented PG film, while I was looking for some Drama, Suspense or Horror films which invariably contained content which was seen as “objectionable”.  She doesn’t even allow her kids to play a lot of what I consider pretty tame video games for the same reason.

So, in short, I was pretty certain that a DVD set of Deadwood wasn’t going to be all that much appreciated.

Family Films

So how about if I just buy these families a Disney DVD compilation or something — all the classics or the Pixar stuff (?)  My biggest concern was that given their interest in family friendly films, and the fact that they wouldn’t buy most of what Hollywood produced for the rest of us, the chances are they already had these movies and had watched them 100 times together.

Then, I had a flash of inspiration.  I’d heard that there were some people, Mormons I believe who had had a church elder explain as far back as the 1970’s that R-rated movies were generally something best to be avoided. (of course, the problem is, there are some really great movies — with great moral or historical lessons — that got branded with R Ratings for violence, nudity, adult situations, etc.)  Some of the really great movies that have a little bit of undesirable content include Glory &  Titanic.

Well, there was great demand from Conservative Christians, Muslims, Mormons, Families with Minors, Dentists (for their young patients), Teachers, Prison Wardens, and Religious Leaders for feature film quality content that had been “cleaned” or otherwise edited for content — like they do for broadcast television or on long flights — but in DVD form so you can watch when the family is ready to watch — Or, be able to deliver it on demand to your classroom, congregation, or passengers, or whatever.

Edited Movies

The demand created a cottage industry around selling and renting edited movies to this market thirsty for clean family-friendly films.  If I had been smart enough to do this several years ago there were still a couple of companies who where renting out edited DVDs with the Netflix model — where subscribers could choose a program to deliver them edited DVDs by mail and no late fees.

Unfortunately, a court case between Hollywood and companies who edited and sold or rented the DVDs had given the studios the power to put all these guys out of business.

There was a separate company that had created a DVD player, ClearPlay, that would take an original CD, as long as someone at ClearPlay had edited it and created a file in their library, and take out the naughty parts.  The problem was, to make this work you had to have a special player, a USB drive, a PC with a connection, and you had to pay a monthly subscription — basically forever.

If I got them ‘hooked’ on this service I’d be basically adding another bill to the monthly nut of these young families, or obligating me to continue paying their monthly — and the monthly nut was outside of my xmas budget for gift giving if I had to cover the whole year.

Edited DVDs

There used to be quite a few sites that sell Edited DVDs — or DVDs with the objectionable content removed, but most of these are out of business when you do google searches or have shifted their business model to selling “family friendly” previously viewed and reviewed and rated films.  Giving them membership with one of the companies like CleanFlicks which does the reviewing and recommendations seemed like a decent idea, but there was that monthly membership fee again.

I finally found a site that would allow me to buy online edited DVDs.  I could buy here and have them shipped to my friends and family.  I managed to catch one of their sales, liquidating some inventory.  I’m not sure if they are in danger of being put out of business as well, but I managed to snag some nice new releases of blockbuster films like the Spider Man Series, 3:10 to Yuma, and GI Joe, Star Trek, and Angels and Demons.

I know DVDs and movies just get consumed, but most of my family seemed to enjoy the gift of entertainment.  As it pertains to these edited movies, hopefully, they can appreciate and enjoy the relaxed family time of having a movie they can watch and enjoy without worrying about a gratuitous sex scene, or some profanity popping up in front of their five year old…”mommy, what does fubar stand for?”

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Tags: Clean Movies, Edited DVDs, Edited Movies, Family Films
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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