Dvd warning

I went home yesterday after "The Cunning Little Vixen" (well-played, mostly well-sung, but I thought the production was a bit twee and visually cluttered compared to others I've seen, and over-emphasising the humour at the cost of losing some of the pathos) - anyway, I went home and I saw I'd left the Dvd of "District 9" on top of a loudspeaker. My father would have had fits. So I moved it. Moving it, I found myself reading the back of the box (I've always been inclined to read anything in front of me. Cereal packets, road signs, the back page of someone else's newspaper, you name it. It's as if my brain goes "Ooh look, words; yum..."). Anyway; I read the back of the box, and I noticed this: "Warning; contains scenes of violence and one use of very strong language".

I love these warning notices. First that lovely one for "Mayerling" and now this. One use of strong language? Would that be "one" in the sense of "several thousand instances of strong language, but all of them are of the same word"? Or "one" as in "actually there's so much swearing we think you'll stop counting after a while, and stop noticing it altogether soon after that"?

Now I don't have a problem with foul language (sadly my friends can confirm this) and I'd have to say that, were I in the situations in which Wikus Van Der Merwe finds himself in the film, I would certainly be turning the air blue, too. But I know people who do mind swearing, who might think that "one instance of very strong language" means exactly that - one instance. Whoops.

My guess is that there is a list somewhere of "strong" and "very strong" language; perhaps "f*ck" is only "strong" and other terms are categorised as "very strong". I don't remember, amid the waterfalls of f*cking, f*ckers and f*cks, picking up on any c*nts... but then I wasn't listening out for them, of course...

Who cares? The movie was a thrill-ride anyway, and it gave me back faith in the infinite renewability of the genre. Neill Blomkamp for PM! (Yes, I know he can't be PM, but, face it, the options we do have are so lousy that a talented South African film-maker would probably make a better fist of the job than any of them).