Freddy Got Fingered: Don't Believe the Hype
by Rusty W. Spell

Tom Green's first movie Freddy Got Fingered won five awards -- including worst picture -- at the 22nd annual "Razzies," the awards ceremony which selects the worst movies of the year, one day before the Oscars. Tom Green's comedy may not suit everyone's taste, but this is ridiculous.

I'm not upset at the Golden Raspberry Award Foundation so much, since they're not a very serious establishment to begin with. I'm mostly using them here as a starting off point. Though I do believe they should re-think what makes a bad movie, especially with movies like Planet of the Apes (which won worst remake) or 3,000 Miles to Graceland (my pick for worst movie of the year, one which is offensively bad; they at least nominated this one) having been made. I'm more upset with serious folks like CNN who said that Freddy Got Fingered was "the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history." Again, ridiculous.

I know lots of people hate Tom Green. I even understand why they do, even if I don't hate him at all. And I can understand why people might hate Freddy Got Fingered. But the point is that Freddy Got Fingered is something different. Anything different is going to make people hate it. But it will also have people who love it. Who loved 3,000 Miles To Graceland or Planet of the Apes? I don't know of anyone. People may have tolerated them, because people overlook things which are basically like everything else. There was nothing new about those two movies, but there was lots new about Tom Green's movie.

None of the Razzie categories the movie "won" made any sense. Worst actor, Tom Green: Worse than Kevin Costner, who is supposed to be a good actor (unlike Tom Green) and yet is one of the most horrible around? A non-actor, Tom did great, especially for what he was doing. He achieved as an actor exactly what the scenes required him to do.

Worst director, Tom Green: This could only be a "well, we picked him for everything else" selection, since Tom (again, not even a director by trade) made one of the most interesting-looking movies, especially for a comedy movie. He had a philosophy about his direction for the movie, saying that he didn't want it to look like a comedy, no popping-out colors to suggest "laugh at this," but that the comedy would come from somewhere else. Unlike, say, Legally Blonde (which wasn't nominated for a Razzie, but a Golden Globe!) which essentially ripped off the Clueless production design and hoped that its rainbow prettiness would compensate for everything that was lacking.

Worst screenplay, Tom Green and Derek Harvie: Actually, the screenplay worked on so many levels I can't even list them all here: the real story being told, the family interaction, the diffusion of movies themselves, the quite real dysfunction and pain that appears, the allowance for improv, the scene-by-scene humor which never slows down, the way that most everything that appears symbolically deepens the story (such as the baby delivery, Gord wearing its cord, the presence of semen, Gord escaping his father by breaking a window with Freud's head, even Leave It To Beaver clips), all of the things that film and English students will be writing about and digging for if anyone ever gives the movie its proper credit...

Worst screen couple, Tom Green and "any animal he abuses": Okay, well, they are a joke institution after all, so I guess I'll give them that one if they want it.

Apparently, it's one of those things that's hip to do: pick on something that everyone else is picking on. People only listen to what TV tells them anyway -- that's old news, and it will continue to happen. If you truly hate Freddy Got Fingered, that's fine. I understand. But it certainly doesn't deserve the negative attention it has received, and I hope people who believe what TV tells them will ignore it long enough to find out for themselves what they think of this -- at least to me -- excellent movie which is like nothing I've ever seen.