Oh, I don't know about you, but to me, Tom Green is pretty nostalgic.
"My bum is on the rail! Bum is on the rail!"
Like, how did this happen, America?
Tom Green was very flash-in-the-pan. And for those of you who don't remember,
Tom Green came to international fame through his MTV talk show.
Here's a guy who was funny only to 13-year-old-idiots.
Unfortunately there are a lot of 13-year-old idiots. And the Tom Green Show's popularity skyrocketed,
featuring such cutting-edge documentary-style stories as breaking shit in stores,
painting graphic porn on your parents' car, torturing your friends, and shoving shit in people's faces.
[innocent passerby] "I'm assuming that's, uh... excrement."
Basically, Tom Green's brand of comedy was to annoy the hell out of all unfortunates in his path.
And what else could bring a man that degree of popularity that quickly?
[Green laughs annoyingly]
But in order to do an episode on Tom Green I'd have to look at the entire Tom Green catalogue,
and I don't think I have enough brain juice for that.
Hey, didn't Tom Green make a movie?
You're right.
He did!
Given the obvious trajectory for anyone who gets even the smallest modicum of fame ever,
as Kevin Smith once put it,
"failing upward," Tom Green made the leap from MTV sensation of annoying to
silver screen phenomenon that he might annoy even more people,
to the point that in a mere two years since his debut on MTV,
Green's stardom had risen so high that Regency and 20th Century Fox said
"Here, have 15 million dollars. Write and direct a movie."
Freddy Got Fingered is a surprisingly traditional story,
the tale of an aspiring animator who can't catch a break.
It deals mainly with Gord, played by Green, and his daddy issues.
Widely considered to be one of the very worst films ever made, it was panned at the time of its release,
winning 5 razzies in the process. Even Roger Ebert, who likes everything, wrote in this review,
[Brad Jones' voice] "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."
Ebert went on to say that while the day would never ever EVER come that the film could be considered funny,
the day MIGHT come where it might be considered a masterpiece of neo-surrealist Dadaist cinema.
In fact, the film has gained something of a cult following and has a little bit of a renaissance based on the
I-can't-tell-if-they're-being-hipster-ironic belief that this film is a countercultural art piece.
Not "so bad It's good", "so bad it's art."
So, one little 90-minute movie instead of an entire television series.
That will keep it short.
Yeah, this will be much easier.
[in unison] How bad could it be?
[montage of Green, Lindsay, and Nella screaming, set to classical music]
Sau-sa-ges
[more screaming, sausage-smacking sounds]
[Lindsay and/or Nella screaming]
[Lindsay cries softly]
[Nella screams]
It's mostly worn off for me.
[Nella screams again]
I think I've reached words again.
I can't finish this. But I'm contractually obligated to finish it.
Damn Channel Awesome and its contractual obligations.
I mean, I could push it on someone else.
What about those people who think it's an art film?
Hello, Kyle, the new art film critic guy?
Yeah, you want to review Freddy Got Fingered with me?
The neo-surrealist art film?
No, no you don't need to come here. We'll meet you halfway.
This is it. Okay, well... Kyle? Did you watch the movie yet? Kyle?
God!
Ew...
Is that what I think it- Oh...
Oh my God!
Oh, Kyle! Oh my God, ok-
[Nella] Oh God, wake up! Wake up! Oh God!
[Nella] Uh, oh God, uh...
quick, sing something from Le Mis!
♫ There's a grief that can't be spoken. ♫
[Lindsay and Nella sigh in relief]
♫ There's a pain goes on and on ♫
[Lindsay] Alright, that's enough-
♫ Empty chairs at empty ta-
Kyle!
[Lindsay] Oh, God.
Alright - wow, you're taller than I remember - next musical review, for realsies, I promise.
So anyway, tell us how this is a dadaist masterpi-
This cannot be dada!
It's too normal to be dada!
It's too shit to be anything else!
Use your smart mouth words.
Okay, let me go towel off.
[Lindsay] Have at it!
Dada.
A movement begun in Zurich with the likes of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Hans Richter,
that flourished in the decade immediately after the end of WWI.
It was started out of cynicism.
They believed that any culture that could have produced such a horrible, inhuman bloodbath
like the first world war, had no intrinsic value.
So, dada was set up as anti-art. Art that aims to destroy all other art.
In order to be called a dadaist piece there would have to be no plot at all, not even the sad
facsimile of plot, which resembles more that of early Adam Sandler comedies.
But honestly the things Green does in the film don't stray far from usual things one would have seen
in the most highly-regarded performance art of the last 20 years.
I would like to remind people that the most highly-regarded performance art of last 20 years
included a theatrical piece where a woman stripped naked and bathed herself in honey
while reciting a monologue about Winnie the Pooh doing BDSM.
And before you ask, I'm not making a word of that up.
[Lindsay, distantly] Talk about the whole Tom Green oeuvre.
I can't talk about the Tom Green oeuvre.
[Lindsay] Why not?
I don't know anything about the Tom Green oeuvre.
[Lindsay groans]
Well I do.
"I gotta get the poo off my bum! Poo-poo!"
The original Canadian rapper/actor, the Orson Wells of our time, Tom Green.
As someone who may or may not have been addicted to MTV
at the height of the whole Tom Green thing and
may or may not have voted for the Bum-Bum song on TRL and watched all his first series,
I get it.
This film was, however, realistically the only film the studio could have expected to get for their money.
Tom Green is scared and confused in a directionless sort of way.
"I can't think of anything to draw because I'm so stupid!"
He hates society. He hates... Adam Sandler movies, apparently.
But his hate is aimless. His goals are unclear and unrefined, and therefore lack poignancy.
So his targets are amorphous but what about his actual creative body of work?
Weeeell....
"Finally gave up on those stupid doodles."
"They're not stupid. They're not stupid!"
[Lindsay] No, Tom, they quite are.
[Green] "A bag of eyes on the other end with uh [stuttering]
baboon, baboon eyes."
[Lindsay] See, film students. You want your auteur theory? It's right the f*ck here. Fellini's Eight and a Half,
Bardot's Contempt, Green's Freddy Got Fingered,
all shocking insights into the souls of their creators.
"Ding-Dong Ding-Dong"
What? At least I'm trying!
This scene, for instance:
"You really want to be an animator? Get inside dead animals."
[Lindsay] Earlier in what I think is the second act, raw human idiocy.
[Green hollering]
And you may be wondering if this thing comes back into the movie in any way shape or form.
[flatly] Ha.
"I wasn't expecting that to happen!" [Green laughs]
[Lindsay] Knowing what I remember about Green,
the way he treats his friend and especially his poor parents on his TV show,
this film makes a creepy amount of sense as to how Tom Green sees the world,
a world full of people telling him to shut up.
[montage of characters telling him to shut up]
It's particularly fascinating in that people don't get what he wants,
and he, under the delusion that he DOES know what he wants,
well...
[Green singing eerily] "Daddy would you like some sausage? Daddy would you like some sausages?"
[Kyle] 'Daddy would you like some sausage' indeed.
Well if we are going to humor the auteur notion, then Tom Green, like most two-year-olds,
is very fascinated with his dingle-dangle.
"Oh, oh this is fun! Look at me, Daddy, I'm a farmer!
Ohhhh this is fun! Look at me, Daddy! I'm a farmer!"
Interpret that.
Horses represent maturity as owning a horse meant the onset of adulthood and freedom of mobility.
When he strokes the horse's penis he calls out "look, Daddy"
as if trying to impress his father.
Perhaps the exaggerated phallus could mean the onset of manhood.
And this interpretation...
-Extracted directly from my anus, yes.
You know it's art because this scene is neither mentioned nor referred to again.
[Kyle] Well, it was motif-wise.
Green wields a giant sausage in the cheese sandwich factory, yet another phallic object.
Again in the apartment of the love interest, who insists repeatedly upon her enjoyment of fellating him.
She has an obsession with long, hard rockets, and when indulging her oral fixation,
she stops when she realizes that he's taped an umbilical cord to his stomach.
"That's my umbilical cord."
See, look, motifs! It's getting more and more artsy every agonizing minute!
Uh... is there anything we could say about this love interest?
She exis-
Besides the fact that she exists.
She has a nice place.
Not played by Green's then-girlfriend and future ex-wife Drew Barrymore,
who does appear in the film briefly to scream and be abused,
the poor, maligned love interest is played by, uh...
a poor man's Tara Reid.
And Tara Reid is the poor man's Tara Reid. She has a strange fixation on performing fellatio.
And in a role reversal it is he who is put off by her strangeness,
longing for normalcy despite his own taped-on umbilical cord.
"That's my umbilical cord."
[Kyle] And there's that hardly-subtle pan from the beginning of fellatio
to a photo montage of the Eiffel tower being built.
[Lindsay] And the love interest does have an unhealthy obsession with rockets.
"And I like rockets, because they're hot, and hard, and long."
And the parade of dongs just marches on!
This movie is 70% phallic symbol.
The love interest is fascinating partially because she seems very
pervertedly designed to appeal to people with a virgin-whore complex.
[Lindsay] How so?
[Kyle] Well she's obsessed with fellatio so she can appeal to men who want a demon in the sack.
"I'm gonna give you a blowjob."
However, she's also virginal because they don't have sex.
He simply whacks her paraplegic legs with a bamboo stick and that gets her off.
She's also a nurse and therefore a perfect caregiver,
but she's wheelchair-bound so she needs someone to care for her.
She's like a twisted parody of every market-tested universal love interest in rom-com history.
That's a bit sickening.
And worst of all, she gives us an excuse to get into the hospital.
And this is bad because...
[screaming and crying from all characters involved]
[Green] "Wakey-wakey!"
Quick, think of a joke!
That was the second worst thing I've ever seen on film involving a newborn baby.
The worst thing is of course this:
The biggest crux of the plot, if you look hard enough, is Gord's relationship to his father, played by Rip Torn.
[Kyle] Played by Rip Torn as less of a human and more like a warthog who learned English.
"LIAAAAAAAAR!!!"
And the whole film is essentially Gord trying to win the affection of his father,
leading to endless scenes of Green and Torn yelling each other like orangutans,
though it's tough not to empathize with Torn considering Green's antics.
[sausage clip played again]
A whole room full of dangling phallic symbols.
[Lindsay] The main source of tension between them
is the fact that Green is a psychotic unemployed adult child
who stages idiotic stunts like this.
[Torn] "What the fuck is going on?"
[Green] "I'm underwater. Look, I found a treasure!"
"sau sa ges"
[Kyle] And he has this bizarre habit of repeating words and phrases ad nauseam.
"I'm gonna make you proud, Daddy. You're gonna be so proud. Proud!"
"Look at me, Daddy! I'm a farmer! Look at me, Daddy! I'm a farmer!
I'm a farmer, Daddy!"
Any idea what that's about?
I'm leaning towards an absurdist interpretation, like the repetition is him trying to emulate Eugène Ionesco.
Name-drop!
[Kyle] Although absurdism was usually meant to illustrate something deeply wrong with society...
humanity, whatever, this only seems to be taking issue with other comedy movies.
It's like an exaggeration of other schlock.
[Lindsay] Yes, like that scene in the restaurant where they do that cliche
classical-music-plays-while-hijinks-ensue bit.
[Kyle] And he draws attention to how bad the joke essentially is.
"This is a fancy restaurant!"
[Lindsay] Well, I know none of you are wondering,
how does Gord's story pay off?
First with him getting his wish despite his talent level for his art of choice being deeply in the red.
"With that kind of creativity, I'm completely comfortable green lighting this fucking project."
Well that explains how this movie got greenlit.
And this is the project that Anthony Michael Hall got for his millions:
[Green's voice in falsetto] "Hear the funny sound? Do you hear the funny sound?
It's my hooves! It's my hooves! My hooves! My hooves!"
[Green's normal voice] "ZEBRAAA IN AMERICAAAA!"
Some poor clod had to animate this shit.
Although, to be fair, he did accurately predict about 70 to 80% of the content of Adult Swim and Youtube.
With this unrealistically-giant check he gets for this cartoon,
he takes the money, spends half on jewels for his ladylove,
"Gordon, I don't care about jewels. I just wanna...
I just wanna suck your cock."
I guess this is Green's measure of a winner.
[Kyle] And he spends the rest of the movie in a large, elaborate revenge fantasy
where he transports his father to Pakistan and sprays him with elephant semen.
[elephant trumpeting]
Um... parallel with the horse penis before...
continuation the phallic motif... eh, I give up.
It's planting and pay off.
What? It is!
Like, in the beginning of the film he learned the art of jerking off large mammals,
which is then paid off at the end of the film when he successfully jerks off the elephant
and torpedoes his own father in the stomach with gallons and gallons of elephant bunk. It's art!
God, Green's an idiot.
Yeah, the whole semen thing is really kinda-
Now the scene takes place on the Indian subcontinent, and that is clearly an African elephant.
Idiot.
[Lindsay] And he comes back to America, and is greeted as a hero.
[Kyle] And there's an American flag hastily superimposed onto Green's face even though he's Canadian.
And by this point the whole movie basically coalesces into a morass of...
Why?
"Wait for me!"
[Kyle] Oh dear Jesus God why?!
[little boy] "I'm ok! I'm ok, Daddy!"
[Lindsay] No, see, he's okay! The movie said so!
They didn't jam that in at the last second to avoid an NC-17 rating at all.
Though one important question remains.
What the hell did Drew Barrymore see in him?
Not that one.
Why is this called Freddy Got Fingered?
At a point somewhere between the sixth and eighth hour of the film,
Gord lies about how his father sexually abused his brother, who's barely in the film at all.
Then while Tom Green's cancer special plays on Freddy's TV, the state comes and takes him to a
children's home where Freddy stays for the duration of the film.
[Kyle] You may wonder,
if Freddy was actually fingered, as an adult, wouldn't he just be suggested therapy
and not simply sent to a home?
Wouldn't that be against the law for an adult?
But then you'd also have to wonder why Green wasn't arrested for this,
or this,
or fired for this,
and a thousand other tiny things.
And that... would simply drive you mad.
I don't hate it.
I can't! See, I prefer to review movies that try and engage you. This...
doesn't even try. Like, this might cause pain,
but I cannot hate it because it cannot fail because it does not try.
[Kyle] Then again, it does not try, but succeeds in not trying.
Its goal is not to engage the audience, but alienate it.
It's a shock anti-comedy, taking a formula common to comedies at the time,
a down-on-his-luck creative young adult must overcome his family and make it big in
comedy, rock, music, animation, whatever's cool at the moment,
and warping it into a bitter screed against lowbrow comedy churned out by the Farrellys and the Wayans
and the Sandlers of Hollywood.
This might mean that Freddy Got Fingered is to comedy what A Serbian Film is to horror.
[Lindsay] I feel like Tom Green somehow
punked the whole world for a few years by being popular.
Everyone in this movie is too good for this, even Rip Torn, even Shaq,
[Shaq] "Can he do it like this, huh?"
His then-girlfriend who he happily abuses on screen... everyone.
[Kyle] And there's a place for that.
There's a place for transgression in art. Some boundaries need to be pushed,
and some societal norms need to be challenged.
But you could call anything art.
"Betty told me this is what I need to do in order to become an artist."
You could call trolling art.
This entire film is analogous to the internet troll face meme.
It does not worsen or intensify the pain upon watching this image for the same length of time.
So what you're saying is...
Canada must be punished.
But we are but two internet reviewers. We are so impotent, so powerless.
Not entirely impotent.
This is for Nickelback!
[Canadian sobbing] I'm sorry!
This is for burning down the White House!
Why are you doing this?!