Since I have nothing else to report…
Aug 22nd, 2007 by Bryan White
Very few movies have ever gotten the best of me. I can weather the worst storms ever committed to film but only a few challengers have ever managed to stop me dead in my tracks. I do this out of a twisted sense of duty. I just can’t seem to force myself to stop a movie early and never come back to it. Never. That said, three movies stand victorious above me:
The Pest: I’ve never made it past the shower rap scene at the very beginning. This one stands as the champ as I have repeatedly tried to make it through only to be stopped dead, disgusted with myself no more than two or three minutes into the movie. Fuck you, John Leguizamo.
Underworld: I tried to watch this once and stopped it around forty minutes in. There’s a reason we have dozens of used copies of this movie at the record store. In a world where vampires fight werewolves, everyone has a shitty European accent and speaks in sharp, stacatto enenunciation as if they’re angry at everyone. I would be too if I were in Underworld.
Freddy Got Fingered: I never got caught up in the culture of MTV. They develop everything with the teenager in mind and I’m not a teenager. Not even as a teenager would I have been into Jackass or Punkd, though. So I also never got into Tom Green, but I do recognize something in him. Maybe it’s a desperation to latch onto anything remotely resembling Andy Kaufman, I can’t say for sure. I’ll always give Tom a shot and he’ll most always let me down.
Case in point, Freddy Got Fingered. I’ve never been told by anyone, not even my friends who tried to explain the awesome that I missed in 3000 Miles To Graceland, that Freddy Got Fingered was a good flick. It’s maddening, though. A movie so stupid that you run the risk of brain damage by watching so much as five minutes of it. While surfing a list of the worst movies ever made, I inevitably came across Freddy and read something that I was unfamiliar with:
Freddy, unsurprisingly won a bunch of Razzies against some other awful movies and Green showed up in person to receive the award.
“It is a very proud day for me.”
Green concluded his speech with a specially-composed piece of music he played on the harmonica.
The organisers had to drag the star off the stage when it became clear his composition was never-ending.
“Apparently I have to make way for a birthday party,” shouted Green.
So there you go.
It just made me laugh.
One day I will write an extensive essay on why I believe “Freddy Got Fingered” to be one of the best examples of neosurrealism in mainstream American cinema. I’m sure someone will have me committed as soon as its published.
We’re thinking alike. I’m convinced that there is something there in primitive infancy. Like the very beginnings of a diamond. With time and exploration, maybe I’ll find it. There is something so fucked up about Freddy Got Fingered that it transcends mere stupidity. It’s so completely awful on the surface, worse than any Uwe Boll movie I’d say, but I refuse to believe that during the production, the writers, director and producers could have been blind to this fact. It’s as if it were written idiots huffing spray paint over one excessive weekend orgy of inhalants. Someone must have looked at the dailies, the script pages, whatever and declared, “This is seriously retarded. What am I doing here?”
Unless!
There’s something there, hidden beneath the surface. A maddening genius of dadaism. Surrealism for surrealism’s sake. A completely misunderstood movie that will one day be rediscovered by fanatical bad movie buffs.
I’d like to be that buff.