Freddy Got Fingered
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| Freddy Got Fingered | |
|---|---|
 Original film poster |
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| Directed by | Tom Green |
| Produced by | Larry Brezner Howard Lapides Lauren Lloyd |
| Written by | Tom Green Derek Harvie |
| Starring | Tom Green Rip Torn Marisa Coughlan Eddie Kaye Thomas Harland Williams Anthony Michael Hall Julie Hagerty Darren Moore |
| Music by | Mike Simpson |
| Cinematography | Mark Irwin |
| Editing by | Jacqueline Cambas |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox Regency Entertainment |
| Release date(s) | April 20, 2001 |
| Running time | 89 min |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Official website | |
| IMDb profile | |
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 and scenes in Road Trip. It is largely built around gross-out and shock humor.
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[edit] Plot
Green plays a 28-year old part time slacker/cartoonist named Gordon "Gord" Brody who is pursuing his ambition to obtain a contract for a TV show.
After being told quite correctly that his ideas are stupid and make no sense, he decides to move back home and rethink his future, much to his father's dismay. He 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. Strangely, when child services takes him away, no one seems to question the fact that Freddy is 25, well past the age of majority.
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 injured as a result 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.
In a deleted scene of the Blu-Ray DVD special edition of Freddy got Fingered, there is a scene, involving Freddy's father (Rip Torn) being so overwhelmed with emotion of being accused of sexually molesting his son that he proceeds to hold Freddy down and rape him until he bleeds. This is not shown graphically but continually referenced throughout the other deleted scenes.
[edit] Production
The theatrically released version of the movie is 89 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 with a comedic voice over. Footage of Tom Green masturbating a horse was shot but did not make it into the final cut; this footage was leaked by the Newgrounds website before the movie was released.[1]
[edit] Critical response
The film received overwhelmingly negative reviews by critics, some 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."[2]
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.[3]
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.[4]
Film critic James Berardinelli 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.[5] Another favorable review in August 2007 by Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club partially fulfilled Ebert's prediction: Rabin called the film a "borderline Dadaist provocation" and rated it a "Secret Success"[6]
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 many Tom Green fans who consider it a brilliant movie, making it a cult classic as a result. 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 acknowledgment of the critical consensus regarding the film's merits, Green appeared at the ceremony to accept his awards, saying:
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.[7]
[edit] Box office
The movie's budget was $15,000,000, and grossed $14,249,005 domestically. It ran for 59 days in North American cinemas.[8] DVD rentals in the US grossed $24,300,000 during its stay on the top 50 weekly chart, allowing the film, despite its criticisms, to become financially successful.[9]
[edit] References
- ^ Freddie Got Fingered Gets Fingered- Website Won't Name Names, cinema.com.
- ^ Paul Clinton's review of Freddy Gets Fingered at CNN.com
- ^ Roger Ebert's review of Freddy Got Fingered
- ^ Roger Ebert's review of Stealing Harvard
- ^ New York Times
- ^ My Year of Flops Case File #61: Freddy Got Fingered
- ^ "Green gets fingered for Razzies", BBC News
- ^ Freddy Got Fingered box office data
- ^ Freddy Got Fingered US DVD rentals gross
