Time Out For This Important Message
A Geezer’s Notebook, By Jim Foster
I don’t like begging for money, but I may need a bit of financial help with my latest cause célèbre. I am planning on buying CTV and firing the jerk who ruined Two Weddings and a Funeral July 26th, 2019. He, no doubt with malice aforethought, or with no thought at all, cut the funniest scene from the movie to run a whole whack of commercials. As a matter of fact, I may go even further and sack the station manager too. He must have known what was going on.
This might be a bit complicated if you haven’t watched the movie but Hugh Grant, the British actor, was somehow trapped in a hotel room set aside for the bride and groom to get their things together as they say. Well perhaps they don’t say that exactly, but newlyweds (Sophie Thompson and David Haig Bernard) in a fit of lust not seen on the screen since Michael Douglas had his way with Glenn Close on the kitchen sink in the classic love story Fatal Attraction, gloriously and loudly consummatedtheir marriage so quickly and with such enthusiasm they never even bothered to take their clothes off.
Poor Hugh was trapped in the bathroom, an unwitting voyeur. I have been in the same situation many, many times but usually I was witting.
CTV, the mercenary and merciless cads, cut that scene altogether. All they showed was the groom looking out the door with lipstick on his face. Someone must pay the price for this shameless act of cinematic destruction. No doubt it all has to do with making room for another dozen commercials. Instead of enjoying the movie we were subjected to a string of hucksters pushing Corona beer, two astronauts ruining a space lift-off for a Pepsi, and something about Subway sandwich which I missed because I was irate, crying and shaking so wildly Mary had the 9 and the 1 already punched in on the home line and my cardiologist waiting on the cell phone.
On the other hand, it may have been to appease the sexual sensibilities of some wacko from the prudish religious right. How God ever got himself involved with these yoyos is beyond me. After all it was Him who designed the parts to fit together.
I don’t know if you have seen Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it is a typical Hugh Grant film wherein he acts like a complete ass all through the movie, but gets the girl in the end. (That’s a poor way of putting it. ‘at’ the end, that’s better.) In this case he wins the heart, and other parts as well, of Andie MacDowell, who quite frankly was a bit of a tramp in the film with the morals of an alley cat as I recall. (Quite a lovely alley cat come to think of it.) Later in the movie she married a Scottish Laird, but dumped him shortly after the nuptials. I assume right after the wind blew his kilt up.
A bit of an aside here, but Hugh John Mungo Grant managed to rise above the spitefulness of his parents who named the little tot ‘Mungo’ – the poor little b—–d.
No doubt you will recall this isn’t the first time I have gone nuts over TV stations ruing a good movie by slashing the crap out of it and filling the spot with endless commercials. They did it to Castaway one evening leaving Tom Hanks standing in the middle of the road looking lost and forlorn. The cads missed him smiling at the end when those of us with a romantic soul realized he was going to follow the beautiful girl to her ranch. Instead we got the string of inane ads we had already seen countless times during the film and is the reason that two-hour movie runs from 8:00 to 11:00, or later if they can get away with it.
They did it again in The Big Country cutting a scene where Chuck Connors shows what a ratter his character really was and the viewers were all wondering why nobody liked him. (I knew of course since I had already watched the movie 27 times. I had fallen in love with Jean Simmons and sent a number of letters and pictures of myself in scanty attire until she had the police contact me. I don’t think it was her actually; I think it was her husband who sent the cops after me.)
Oops I have to go. Andie is waiting in the driveway.
