Freddy Got Fingered

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freddy Got Fingered (2001) is a comedy film directed by and starring Tom Green. Some of the scenes are similar to the antics seen in his own The Tom Green Show. It is largely built around gross-out and shock humor.

Freddy Got Fingered original movie poster

1 Plot
2 Production
3 Critical response
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In the movie, Green plays a cartoonist named Gordon Brody (nicknamed 'Gord') pursuing his ambition to obtain a contract for a TV show. Gord also has a handicapped love interest, played by Marisa Coughlan, and a best friend, played by Harland Williams, who has left Gord's lifestyle for a mainstream bank job. A major subplot is Gord's feud with his father, and at one point in the movie, Gord accuses his father, played by Rip Torn, of molesting his younger brother, Freddy, played by Eddie Kaye Thomas. During the course of the film, we are introduced to various other subplots that catalog Gord's daily experiences. These include a local neighborhood boy who finds himself the victim of various misfortunes, often involving Gord's entry onto the scene. Tom Green's then wife Drew Barrymore has a cameo appearance playing the receptionist at Mr. Dave Davidson's cartoon company.

[edit] Backwards Man

In one scene of the movie, Gord dons his father's suit backwards. While admiring himself in the mirror, Gord begins walking backwards and forwards toward the mirror, muttering: - - :I'm the backwards man, the backwards man. - -

I can walk back as fast as you can. - - :I can walk back as fast as you can.

Despite the film's pitiful showing at the box-office, this scene remains one of the more referred to and popular scenes.

[edit] Daddy would you like some sausage?

In one memorable scene, Gord sets up an elaborate pulley system with sausages on the end of the pulley and plays the piano while singing, in an attempt to combine his favorite activities, eating and music. When his father enters and asks what he is doing Gord bangs randomly on the piano and sings: - - :Daddy would you like some sausage? - :Daddy would you like some sausages? - - This scene is one of the more quoted scenes in the film, and was even remixed with the Super Mario Brothers 3 underwater theme.

[edit] How Gord Spends His $1,000,000

Later in the film Gord finally manages to sell his animations. This is how he spends the million dollars he receives:

Buying a shark for the roof of his car and hiring a helicopter to see his girlfriend	$100,000
Jewels for his girlfriend	$150,000
Spy and glass cutting equipment to break into his own house and a tranquilizer to subdue his father while he pays for building work to move half of the house to Pakistan	$750,000

[edit] Production

The theatrically released cut of the movie is 87 minutes long and received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. As an extra on the DVD release, Green also included a version of the movie which he had edited to secure a PG rating. The PG-rated cut of Freddy Got Fingered is three minutes long.MATT RESen IS THA BEST

[edit] Critical response

The film was almost universally panned by critics, many of whom gave it zero stars. The Toronto Star created a one-time new rating just for Freddy got Fingered, giving it "negative one star out of five stars." CNN's Paul Clinton called it "quite simply the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history" and listed the running time as "86 awful minutes." [1].

Roger Ebert gave the film a rare zero-stars rating and described the film's humor thus:

"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." ^[2]

Later, however, in his review of the film Stealing Harvard, Ebert wrote:

"Seeing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fingered (2001), which was so poorly received by the film critics that it received only one lonely, apologetic positive review on the Tomatometer. I gave it--let's see--zero stars. Bad movie, especially the scene where Green was whirling the newborn infant around his head by its umbilical cord.

But the thing is, I remember Freddy Got Fingered more than a year later. I refer to it sometimes. It is a milestone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambitious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accomplish something. It failed, but it has not left me convinced that Tom Green doesn't have good work in him. Anyone with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing." ^[3]

James Berardinelli from "Reelviews" also gave the film zero stars and mentioned: "...I have to report that this motion picture is arguably the worst piece of cinematic crap I have ever experienced theatrically. Hyperbole, you wonder? I looked through my list of zero-star movies and couldn't find one entry (except the immortal Zombie Vs. Mardi Gras, which was a straight-to-video release) that ranked as more difficult to endure."

One of the few notable critics who gave it a generally positive review was A.O. Scott of the New York Times, who compared the film to conceptual performance art. [4]

Freddy Got Fingered is thus widely regarded as signaling the absolute limit of what gross-out humor can achieve. Since the film's release, movies based around the strict "shock value" of gross-out humor have been in decline. The movie does have a cult following, including some fans who consider it a so-bad-it's-good type of movie. Others regard the gross-out humor as being so extreme that it makes the film a parody of the genre, as Green indicated was his intention in his autobiography Hollywood Causes Cancer.

The film "won" in five categories at the 2001 Golden Raspberry Awards and, in acknowledgement of the critical consensus regarding the film's merits, Green appeared at the ceremony to accept his awards.

"I'd just like to say to all the other nominees in the audience: I don't think that I deserve it any more than the rest of you. I'd like to say that; I don't think that it would be true, though." - Tom Green, accepting his Razzies