South Park, censorship, and Lust, Caution

We weren't really keen on seeing any version of Lust, Caution, but after finally giving in and ponying up the cash at the local theater (stupid, we know), we watched the sanitized version. Our impression of the movie, sans steamy sex, was that this movie wasn't really all that it was hyped up to be. However, given that about half an hour was taken out, we suspected that we didn't just get a child-friendly film—we got something dismembered, especially in light of character development and motivation. Dong Yanbin, a PhD student in Beijing, felt a bit more cheated than we did, and so decided to sue the censors at SARFT as well as the UME movie theater chain for 500 yuan in psychological damages.

That got us thinking about finding clips of the censored stuff, which was not hard to unearth...except we discovered that most of these clips, while still seemingly on many video-sharing sites, were being blocked, or else were all, at this particular moment, slow as hell. We did manage to find some of it here. Also interesting was a South Park inspired spoof of the Lust, Caution censorship issue. It's in Chinese and pokes fun at censorship and the scenes themselves, as the kids wonder aloud how good the Tony Leung character must be in bed, and if they can learn these techniques to seduce the girls they know.

Later in the video, they go home and look up the deleted parts on video-sharing sites—and after seeing it, exclaim that Ang Lee has "outdone Japanese porn films."