A Drop in Standards

The last thing I would ever consider myself is a prude, especially when it comes to movies. I grew up in a non-LDS household in which I was exposed to plenty of rated R movies filled with all sorts of interesting content. I've also spent the last two years as a film critic for Salt Lake Community College, where I could see anything from the latest Disney film to an unfortunate piece of anti-Mormon cinema I had to sit through. Open mind aside, it doesn't mean I want every piece of my entertainment to contain blood gore and sex. One of my favorite shows is Avatar the Last Airbender, and I echo T.J. with loving Batman the Animated Series. Sadly it's become harder and harder to find places to get that, and I'm very grieved to report that yet another source has fallen to this.

"How It Should Have Ended" has been one of my favorite websites for years. The creators are famous for making cartoon parodies of popular films, and showing how sometimes the endings just don't make sense, like why in Harry Potter they didn't just use the time turner to go back in time and save people? Or why Mystique joins Magneto in X-Men: First Class? They didn't just do family movies either. Saw, Jaws, Black Swan, and a few other R titles make their parody list, and the best part is that no matter how dirty the film is they never swear or do anything questionable in their videos.
Till now.

I decided to see what they had done lately and found a parody of Pulp Fiction. Now as far as R movies go, Pulp Fiction is probably the R-iest, having drugs, sex, profanity, and blood everywhere. A masterpiece in storytelling, it's still not something I wouldn't recommend to everyone. I was surprised though to see that one of the R parts made it into the website's video. It wasn't even that funny or really had anything to do with the film, just some little messed up piece Quentin Taratino had added to emphasis the importance of something else, and yet there it was on "How It Should Have Ended", my once safe website, for all to see. I was highly disappointed.

As my first paragraph said, I'm pretty open minded, so I'm not suggesting a boycott on it or some sort of write-in to make them remove the video. My feeling is that if I'm free to say something then someone else should be free to say the opposite, but it's just disappointing to see something that I could have easily shown to my 3 year old niece turn into yet another thing I have to filter or forget about altogether. And it just goes to show how lacking clean entertainment is in this world, especially since that which is clean seems to want to take a more "edgy" turn in order for...what? More of a fanbase? Does crossing the line from clean to dirty really draw in that many more viewers? Like I said, I've been a fan for years when it was clean, so why change it?

What do you think?

-JOE