DANNY GOT TROLLED

Careful readers of this blog may have detected, here and there, a sense of humor. From other subtle hints I've dropped you may also have surmised that I get a kick of out of fucking with people. Yes, I once mixed a friend a drink called a Fire Island Iced Tea, so called because it would fuck his mind in the ass. (Ed. Note: it did). It is important, if you're going to behave in this way, that you accept the possibility that people will fuck with you right back. And thus, when this Matt Damon/Randy Travis lookin' ass motherfucker lent me Freddy Got Fingered on DVD, I had the sneaking suspicion that I was being trolled. Yes, Mr. Yustin assured me that it was legitimately hilarious, but I've been down this road before (“sure, that second pill won't make you freak out, you'll be fine”) and, remembering the singularly passionate negative critical response the movie got upon its release, I approached watching it with great trepidation.

Turns out, ya know what? It's a pretty funny movie. Tom Green, who co-wrote, directed, and starred, is the kind of comedian one either gets and thinks is hilarious, or does not get and thinks is the Antichrist. His style of humor is he doesn't give a fuck. Observe this classic bit, a collaboration with the similarly divisive Andy Dick:

Bonus Bob Odenkirk: the pause that refreshes. Anyway, Tom Green's popularity itself was considered an act of trolling at his peak. Most critics had no idea what the fuck to make of him and subsequently wrote him off as a talentless hack who just mugged a lot and trashed shit. I freely confess to total confusion myself. I would, if someone asked me, “Are you a Tom Green fan?” say something like “Dear God, no. Heavens! Thinkst thou me hoi polloi?” without really having more than an out-of-context bit here and there or a trailer, and then see him show up in something like Charlie's Angels or Road Trip and be like “Whoa, that guy with the goatee is funny.” This is what happens when you let critical consensus do your thinking for you, kids.

Freddy Got Fingered, in truth, falls between the two polarities of Roger Ebert's “This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels . . . The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny” and A.O. Scott calling it “conceptual performance art”and Nathan Rabin declaring it a “borderline Dadaist provocation.” The truth is, Freddy Got Fingered is a movie by a guy trying to be funny, and whether he succeeds or not depends entirely on the audience's sense of decorum or tolerance for non sequiturs and immaturity. A) Just because something doesn't make any sense doesn't mean it's postmodern or Dada or whatever the fuck and B) far as I'm concerned, a chef should have taste, a comedian doesn't have to. That covers that.

The movie has a number of truly inspired and strange sequences. The opening with Tom Green skateboarding through a shopping mall for no apparent reason had me going “What the fuck? There're actually a couple sweet Steadicam shots. Is this . . . a real movie . . .?” The cinematics, the rest of the movie, aren't quite as flashy, but they're still surprisingly solid considering a laundry list of critics called this one of the worst movies ever made.

As for the cast, Tom Green is Tom Green, doing what he does. There's a point with him where you either have to turn the fuckin movie off or surrender to his insanity, because if you don't find him funny, you're not suddenly going to half an hour in. One thing Tom Green the director does that's very wise is make sure that Tom Green the leading man doesn't overwhelm everything; the supporting cast features any number of really solid performances. Harland Williams is pretty funny getting his ass kicked as Tom Green's buddy, and Julie Hagerty is good in the first thing I've seen her in in about 20 years, as Tom Green's mom (who takes Tom Green's advice that she go out and "have sex with basketball players" to heart and ends up shtupping Shaq, in a funny cameo by himself). Anthony Michael Hall is funny as a Hollywood douchebag (it's always fun for actors to play executives and producers, they get out all kinds of long-simmering resentments). Marisa Coughlan plays the love interest who, of course, is a wheelchair-bound amateur rocket scientist with a fetish for being caned on her paralyzed legs who loves giving head; this, of course, is proof that Marisa Coughlan either has a really solid sense of humor or really needed to pay the fuckin rent.

But above all else, Rip Torn is fucking amazeballs off the fucking reservation in this movie. He plays Tom Green's dad, which explains everything. Rip Torn could kick ass in anything, no matter how bad (and has devoted most of his career to proving this point), and when given some snappy text like in Men in Black or The Larry Sanders Show, he makes being awesome seem utterly effortless. Some examples:

Tom Green: Wow . . . it's a LeBaron!
Rip Torn: You bet your boots it's a LeBaron. Fine car. Convertible.

Rip Torn (about Tom Green): Miserable dead beat punk. Paid for his damn college. Sits around all day wacking off. Proud? My ass.

And of course, the scene when he comes in, shitfaced, and starts casually ripping up Tom Green's drawings. Tom Green nuts up and says “Fuck you.” Rip Torn pulls down his pants and starts waving his ass in Tom Green's face and goes, “Fuck me? Sure, go ahead! Fuck me!” This was some of the funniest shit I've seen in years, and if that means I never get to be grown-up pretentious movie critic like the cool kids, so be it.

What makes Rip Torn's performance so great is that he knows exactly what kind of movie he's in. He knows that, enjoyable though it may be in the right mood, you get what you paid for when you watch a picture called Freddy Got Fingered. We are not in hoity-toity land. We're in a movie where you get fucked up on Wild Turkey and wave your ass in Tom Green's face.

As much I enjoyed the movie, and as unapologetic as I am about so doing, there were large chunks I didn't find particularly funny. The notorious scene where Tom Green swings the newborn baby around the room by the umbilical cord? Not all that funny, though it's not offensive either, amazingly. The two women randomly banging tambourines the whole time make it wonderfully bizarre, like a reflection of something that makes sense in a parallel universe.

The role of animals in the movie is a strange one. Tom Green randomly pulls over to the side of the road to jerk off a horse at one point, because, hey, sometimes you have to randomly pull over to jerk off a horse. Then, following Anthony Michael Hall's advice to “get inside the animals” (Tom Green's initial pitch for his cartoon show lacks character depth), Tom Green finds a dead deer in the road and proceeds to gut it and wear its skin while running around Tom Greening. A bunch of other woodland animals serve as the audience surrogate, looking at Tom Green like “What the . . . fuck . . .?”

Overall, Freddy Got Fingered is kind of like a movie a Martian would make if he came to Earth, went to film school somewhere in upstate Ontario, and fell in with heavy acidheads. It follows the basic linear progression of a “normal” movie, except everything in it is as weird as weird gets. Strangely, though, at the end when Tom Green shows up in a helicopter with a bag of jewels and professes his love to Marisa Coughlan on the roof of her building (over the sound of the helicopter; she has to ask him to repeat himself a lot) and she says to him “I don't care about jewels. I just want to suck your cock” it's both pretty funny and oddly endearing. There's a whole bunch of business earlier about how all she ever wants to do is suck his dick, but Tom Green wants to go out on dates and stuff, so that's as close to “I love you” as you're going to get in a picture like this.

In a weird way, even though I rather enjoyed it, I understand why the critics all had to line up and pan the shit out of Freddy Got Fingered. It's indefensible, which is why I haven't been bothering to defend liking it. Real critics, though, have to defend their opinions; “fuck you, I liked it” works here at Movies By Bowes™ but I imagine the Chicago Sun-Times says “okay, lose the 'fuck' and extrapolate a little, wise guy.” I'm not, by any means, getting up in Roger Ebert's shit for not liking this movie; my mom took me to see Breakin' on his advice, for fuck's sake. Roger Ebert's cool. But his sense of humor, like most people's, has lines past which you ain't getting a laugh. The casual violence and the fact that the title is a reference to Tom Green falsely accusing Rip Torn of molesting Tom Green's brother flipped Rog's fuck no switch. I understand that. The evolution of popular culture has created a separation between an act and the idea of that act that's largely dependent on context. Molestation isn't funny. But Tom Green trying to “win” a therapy session by accusing his dad of molesting his brother is. Or, more to the point, it is when Tom Green throws a marble bust out the window for no reason and then jumps out after it.

I do not, the title of this post notwithstanding, feel like I actually got trolled (just as Freddy never actually got fingered). But do I ever want to see Freddy Got Fingered again? Probably not. Unless, of course, the time is right to mix someone else a Fire Island Ice Tea, itself probably the perfect mixological equivalent to this movie: a deeply irresponsible, mind-altering, and entertaining good time that actual mixologists (or cineastes) would find utterly appalling. But, ya know, sometimes you gotta pull over to jerk off a horse. And there's really no resisting inevitability.