"BRUNO": A WORK IN PROGRESS

If you’re planning to see "Bruno" in a British cinema any time after July 24th, make sure you check which film you’re buying tickets for: there will be two different versions doing the rounds. The version that came out on July 10th was awarded an 18 certificate in Britain. That restrictive rating didn’t stop it from being a hit–it had the biggest opening weekend ever of any 18 film–but it wasn’t as lucrative as Sacha Baron Cohen and his cohorts would have liked. So they’ve now chopped out enough of its rudest material for it to be granted a 15 certificate.

The new cut, which will be in cinemas simultaneously with the original, will be nearly two minutes shorter. Given that Bruno was only about 84 minutes to begin with, this has prompted much internet grousing along the lines of, “What’s left? The opening and closing credits?” It’s also interesting to learn that Baron Cohen and co, who get their laughs from pulverising taboos, shouldn’t want to pulverise quite so many when there’s money at stake.

Just a few days before Bruno 2.0 was announced, news emerged that Richard Curtis would be re-editing "The Boat That Rocked" prior to its American release. The pirate radio comedy, which sank without trace in Britain in April, is going to jettison 20 minutes of footage before it crosses the Atlantic. According to its American distributor, “It will be a shorter, leaner version. We think it is a real crowd-pleaser.” So what does that make the version that British audiences shelled out for? A long, flabby crowd-displeaser? I wonder when we can expect our refunds.

It would be nice if studios made the effort to get their films right before they distributed them, but if two major films are being tweaked like this at the same time, we can assume that the trend is just getting underway. Digital technology makes post-release polishing viable in a way that it never was in previous decades. So we may soon be nostalgic for the days when films were almost never revised after the general public had seen them.

You could say that it’s the dawn of an exciting new era of cinematic democracy, a time when the audience is just as involved in the creation of a film as its nominal producers. But you could also say that if studios are going to treat their first audiences as test-screening guinea pigs, they shouldn’t make them pay for the privilege.

~ NICHOLAS BARBER