Les Jones: Where's Verbal?

November 15, 2003

The Usual Suspects > Where's Verbal?

Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the movie.

So I watched The Usual Suspects for the 15th time last night and noticed something new. At the beginning of the movie, you see each of the characters being picked up by the NYPD. But something's missing. You never see Verbal Kent being arrested. How come? Is that an oversight by the directors, or is it a clue that he's Keyser Soze and he engineered the lineup? (It's also possible that Verbal just works for Soze.)

Posted by lesjones

Comments

One of the cable channels that doesn't allow cursing (maybe TBS or TNT or one of those) had this on recently. If you recall, all the guys in the lineup had to repeat a phrase. The sanitized version was:

"Give me the keys, you fairy godmother!"

Posted by: Anthony Alford at November 18, 2003

What? Those TV executives are such stupid melon farmers! I'd like to kick their melon-farmin' asses!

Seriously, that would be a hard movie to clean up for TV. The cops cuss almost as much as the criminals.

Posted by: Les Jones at November 18, 2003

Almost as funny was the end of Die Hard 2:

"Yippe-ki-yay, Mr. Falcon."

Posted by: Anthony Alford at November 20, 2003

The best TV adaptation I've seen was Boogie Nights. I almost didn't watch it because I thought it would be so butchered, but they were really clever about it.

Instead of dropping or editing the sex scenes, they just put pink stars over the naughty parts. Instead of bleeping or changing dirty words, they just dropped the volume to zero. Just like a missing frame in a movie, your brain fills in the missing part.

Posted by: Les Jones at November 20, 2003