Comedy is a genre where the excuse of "it's supposed to be bad" seems especially lazy.

I think even Tom Green has disowned the film, or blamed it on spite or something.
 

Rock wrote:

I actually think there’s something conceptually interesting about humour this random and abrasive being packaged into a mainstream studio comedy. The problem is that Green is just not a good comedic performer. He just yells and acts like a moron, but without any of the calibration that could sell that kind of thing.

I should probably look this up, since I'm not sure how much is lore or Green's later revisionism.  My recollection is that the studio gave Green a bunch of money, and he claimed to try to sabotage it with all of the random and abrasive bits, but the studio just kept calling his bluff.  And so a lot of the revisionist praise for the film hinges on appreciating it as a middle finger to Hollywood for wasting a lot of their money making the worst film possible.

I was a fan of Green's TV show, and I thought the film was a waste of time.  Green has a very limited lane for what he does well.

Rock wrote:

I think ground zero for the revisionism is Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops piece for the AV Club.

https://www.avclub.com/my-year-of-flops-case-file-61-freddy-got-fingered-1798212339

Thanks, that's a nice reminder from when AV Club had halfway decent writing.  The "moose episode" is a good example from the film that just seemed to me to be try-hard transgressive and feeling really lame as a result.

Rock wrote:

There’s an interview from a few years ago where Green acknowledges he got pushback from the studio but it doesn’t sound like he put his ideas in purely to piss them off.

I don't remember where but I know I saw a Tom Green interview where he acknowledged that he realized he was in over his head after the film was green-lit (and he had taken the money), and he had deliberately tried to sabotage the production by adding the most unacceptable ideas that he could think of, only for the studio to say "sounds great".  I say this under the impression that Tom Green may not be a reliable narrator, or at least less relaible than my memory.

Rock wrote:

But he also spends a lot of the interview promoting his YouTube channel. lol

Last I heard of him, he was driving a pandemic RV through the countryside.  His wife was very cute.

I've also been proudly pro-Freddy Got Fingered since it came out. Now to be clear, I don't think it is that good. It's impossible for a comedy (I guess that's what it is) to be good when so many of it's bits fall completely flat. But it has flashes of brilliance and, even when it is a slog of the worst kinds of gross out humor, and edge lord crap, and deliberately annoying cum twaddle, cumulatively it has an effect that is unlike pretty much anything else I've ever seen.

It reminds me of the relationships I've had with a couple of friends I've had in the past who, while I actually didn't like being around very much, I was always waiting around them to see what they would do next. Sometimes eagerly, sometimes impatiently, sometimes through my fingers.

And, yes, Rip Torn is easily the best thing in it.
 

If we want to start nit picking all the details that don't work, I honestly don't even know where to begin. Every part of it was ill conceived.
For instance, some of those last scenes where the host is wandering around in some kind of fugue state. Was this a part of the transmission? We're we seeing his internal state being broadcast to the nation?  I guess the implication is that we've been hypnotized too but it's so clumsily done, I was just left wondering what the whole point of any of it was. And was it the demons plan to get a Randi-like skeptic to hypnotize those watching? Why? What is the overall implication? Clearly the world didn't end as a result, since we are watching this documentary about this television show years later?
What does any of it mean. What is any of it saying. Why was it so stupid. Why were it's attempts at horror so unbelievably lame? That voice was so dumb. That girl was so annoying. So many faces and wigs I didn't want to have to keep looking at. I don't know where to find the beginning of so much hate, in order to properly articulate anything.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

If we want to start nit picking all the details that don't work, I honestly don't even know where to begin. Every part of it was ill conceived.

What does any of it mean. What is any of it saying. Why was it so stupid.

I guess I'll threaten a *spoiler alert* and say that I thought the ....  #metoo @ Bohemian Grove thing .... was extraordinarily contrived.  A shady Owl Cult with the most powerful politicians, bankers and industry leaders, and the Devil decides that a late night talk show host is the most worthy subject to finally show his face to the public?
                                                     

Exactly. And a third rate talk show host at that.

 

As exceedingly silly as a film about the invention of the Pop-Tart could and maybe should be, and excels the sillier it gets.  The surface farce of infusing corporate intrigue onto something innocuous (breakfast food) is silly enough, but wouldn't be enough to sustain more than a sketch's worth of humor, so I welcomed the increasingly ridiculous absurdities, from the milkman mafia to the mascot proletariat to the sea monkey ravioli.  The film is also stacked with enough talented cameos to keep the amusement of the conceit from going stale, and almost by sheer volume of these amounted to some borderline brilliant moments from Hugh Grant, Kyle Dunnigan, Andy Daly, Bill Burr, John Hamm, Christian Slater and Peter Dinklage that's it's hard to imagine how anyone would feel shortchanged for effort.  In a larger sense, the film is less about product-placement (unlike the other "brand"-based films of late, Kellogs had no involvement in the film and has not appeared to try to cross-promote it) and more about a deeper satire of the ersatz sheen of early '60s culture, driven by TV and advertising and certainly not reflecting anything quite real (Seinfeld's aspiration for fake grass is a clever touch), and the way such a culture may have been perceived from a child who would be the target demo for such advertising media.  This surrealism is enhanced when occasionally extending out into concurrent themes of the Cold War and the Space Race.  (The film has an inspired sequence at the end, filming the close-up mechanics of a toaster in slow-motion to resemble a NASA rocket launch.)  I don't think I was expecting much more than an extended sketch with a few side chuckles, and the film managed to exceed those expectations with something closer to a bucket of chuckles and a couple of true hearty guffaws.

7.5/10

As an aside, it really is a shame that so many critics appear to be using the film as an irrelevant opportunity to pile on Jerry Seinfeld almost exclusively for recent statements he's made in the press about "woke" (*in quotes*) culture which any reasonable person should see has nothing to do with the film itself.  I've even seen some potshots at Amy Schumer for her recent pro-Israel stance, again as if this directly implicates the integrity of breakfast slapstick.  The closest to relevant criticisms involve Seinfeld's lack of acting capability, which granted, but becomes less significant given the frequency of the talented cameos to distract from this.  It also adds to the absurdity when I read some critics flinging around the "boomer" perjorative, considering how, as I explained above, yes, this is a film deeply rooted in the perceptions of boomer children from the 1960s.  Bigotry comes in a number of varieties.
 

I’ve definitely seen the “Seinfeld was the worst part of his own show” take before, but the examples I’ve seen recently seem a lot more smug.

Btw JJ, I’m curious if you’ve seen Civil War yet? This is one where I’m seeing a lot of especially glib takes. I liked it a lot, but found it functioned as borderline exploitation. A plus in my book.

Garland is probably a bit of a bozo in how he handles some of the material, but I do think there's something relatively thoughtful about the idea of covering a story "impartially" when you're more sympathetic to a certain side. Two of the more nuanced takes I read on Letterboxd were from actual journalists, for what it's worth. In any case, I'd be interested to read your thoughts once you do watch it.

EDIT: I suppose I should link those reviews.

https://letterboxd.com/john209/film/civil-war-2024/
https://letterboxd.com/daveweigel/film/civil-war-2024/

Last edited by Rock (5/06/2024 10:02 pm)

The maternity ward scene in Freddy Got Fingered definitely worked for me. At least with that gag, the buildup was exquisite.
Greene: "Oh, I'm sorry, ma'am, I did not realize that you were pregnant."
ME: "Uh–oh..."
Also I wonder if I'm right in thinking that I'm in a minority of people who were able to relate to the "backwards man" scene. I've always assumed most people would receive that bit as mere inexplicable randomness, devoid of meaning or reason. But no, I say, while that scene is most assuredly random and absurd, I maintain that truth lies behind Backwards Man, nonetheless.