So, we saw The Hangover yesterday. The Hangover, in case you haven’t heard, is a movie rated R “for pervasive language, sexual content including nudity, and some drug material.†All of this was in fine evidence in the film we saw; this movie is definitely a “hard R,†as they like to say. But then the film’s end credits rolled and we saw something that to our naïve eyes looked somewhat harder, and made us wonder whether the ever-vigilant MPAA might have turned their screener copy off before the end credits. As you might expect, SPOILERS abound.
The film ends with the main characters discovering a camera that contains photographs of their disastrous guys’ night out, allowing us to finally see actual photographic evidence of all the crazy shit that we’ve been hearing about them having done for the previous hour and a half. As the end credits roll, we see the photographs. Most of it is the usual raunchy stuff: Strippers, roulette tables, Ed Helms with his mouth covered in blood, etc.
However, there are also several explicit photographs of Zach Galifianakis receiving a full-on blow job from a middle-age woman. Like with close-ups and everything! It’s kinda nasty, actually. We’re pretty sure we didn’t dream this — though, admittedly, we were laughing a bit too hard to be thinking clearly. And we’re pretty sure that’s not the sort of stuff the MPAA looks fondly upon, even when it’s being thrust at them by a big fat movie studio with lots of money.
Jeff Wells quoted a reader the other day saying that he overheard a couple of studio executives at a London screening saying the scene won’t be in the final released version. But that anecdote supposedly dates from a couple of weeks ago, and we’re pretty sure the film we saw yesterday is the version going out in theaters. Also, what do British studio executives know?
If we were real journalists, we’d probably follow this up with phone calls to the studio and to the MPAA and to Todd Phillips and Galifianakis himself. But mostly we’re just really hoping that Warner and Phillips and Co. will get away with this. Can the MPAA rescind a rating owing to its own asleep-at-the-switch–ness? We hope not!