The Dreamers

We waited almost a year to see this DVD, for a strange reason. It was originally released with the killer NC-17 rating, because it was Bertolucci. Then the DVD came out in two versions, one 3 minutes shorter, rated R. Hollywood Video didn’t carry the NC-17! This is a reversal of the usual DVD story, where expanded, non-censored versions of theatrical releases dominate.

This whole ratings business is so stupid! No point in getting into chapter and verse, but NC-17 has turned out to be as useless as X, because no newspaper will even advertise the movie. And as for sex vs. violence in the ratings … don’t get me started. Time after time the idiot MPAA has demanded a snip here and a slash there to qualify for the coveted R. This is the first time I recall that the DVD producers wimped out.

Anyway I don’t watch dubbed movies and I don’t watch censored movies, so we had to wait until we were out of town away from our Hollywood MVP privileges. The three missing minutes are pretty hot. Lots of nudity, very steamy sex, to the point where you are asking yourself, are they really doing it?

I wish I could say it’s a better movie. It is an interesting situation, Paris during the student revolution of 1968, it is full of lovely references to other films … but it’s just too hard to like these people and their sexual games.