F-F-Fuck C#ns*rsh!p

As you may or may not have heard, The Weinstein Company has decided to censor their recent Best Picture winner, The King’s Speech. They claim that they made the decision to censor it from an R rating down to a PG-13 in order to broaden the movie’s appeal, but I believe that this is completely unnecessary.

To start, the movie is rated R, essentially, for once scene. In this scene, Colin Firth, playing King George VI, is in a therapy session with Lionel Logue, as played by Geoffrey Rush, and Mr. Logue asks if King George VI stutters when he swears. Firth says that he doesn’t and Rush asks him to feel free to curse, so Firth spouts of a series of swear words for the next 30 seconds to a minute, including several fucks and many other words. It is a great scene and helps show some of the tactics speech therapists use in order to help a patient overcome a speech impediment. The scene is filled with emotional power and is funny to boot. Yet for some reason, the Weinstein Company decided have this scene removed along with possibly some other parts in the movie as well, I honestly don’t know as I reuse to see this version of the movie.

Again, one of the main reasons the Weinstein Company decided to censor this movie is to “broaden its appeal” specifically to try to get more kids to see the movie, or maybe rather to convince more parents to take their kids. Now this is where I point out that I am not bothered by language at all. But that doesn’t really come in to play here. If I had a kid, of any age, and they said that they wanted to go see The King’s Speech, I would be so thrilled that they would rather see a quality movie, a work of art, rather than watch an animated movie where garden gnomes defecate all over one of the greatest plays ever written, that I would take them to see it without hesitation. The movie has no violence and no sex, I wouldn’t mind one bit if my children were exposed to a little bit of language in this movie. Anyway, this is all under the crazy assumption, of course, that children are interested in seeing this movie.

Now I’d like to get to the main reason that this whole PG-13 censorship bothers me: it is the censoring of a work of art. I hate censorship to begin with but I feel the biggest atrocities committed these days are when works of art get censored. Like it or not, film is a form of art and The King’s Speech is a masterpiece. I honestly can’t believe that the writer, director and stars of the movie didn’t oppose this. It is one big slap in their faces. This all reminds me of a story a couple years ago about a student at a Colorado high school who made a beautiful painting of a woman with an exposed breast. The school forced her to put a post-it note over her painting before being allowed to display it at an art show. The rest of the students in the high school wore post-it notes on their chests as a show of support for the student and her painting. Now, unfortunately there is nothing so obvious that we can do to show support for the original R rated version of the movie. However, you can vote with your wallet and refuse to see the atrocious PG-13 version. Get the word out and convince as many people as possible to boycott this version and, instead, wait for the movie to come out on DVD and Blu-ray in a couple weeks.

Once again, DO NOT spend any money on the censored version of The King’s Speech. I could go on and on about this, but I’m going to make this brief.