Double Standards

I've mentioned before that it takes something pretty special to make me raise my eyebrows in surprise out here in Oman.

Today we saw Crank 2 at the cinema. The violence in it is extraordinary and at one point both Larissa and I couldn't look at the screen. The language is filthy too. The f-word is used in pretty much every sentence and even the c-word gets a good deal of screen time. There are brothels and strip clubs featured in most scenes and to top it off, the dialogue is racist, homophobic and every other offensive thing you can think of.

The scenes featuring nudity were of course ruthlessly cut in the editing suite (we often wonder which lucky Omani gets that job) but everything else was left unchecked.

That any scene featuring nudity is mercilessly edited, but all scenes featuring people hacked into pieces, blown to smithereens, decapitated, burned alive, gutted like a fish etc. remain, speaks volumes about the ridiculous and contradictory nature of the overly-sensitive Islamic faith's attitude to censorship (in my humble opinion of course).

It's very entertaining though and the Omanis certainly thought so too. They couldn't believe their luck that so much flesh was on display mixed with such extreme violence and I didn't hear a single mobile phone go off throughout the entire movie.