| F*ck
How am I going to manage this one? How can I write a review
of a film with a title that FanboyPlanet.com writers aren’t
supposed to use? I’m not quite sure, but I’m more
certain that I’ve got to try so that fans of documentaries
like The Aristocrats can find the next great crass
dandy.
F*CK
is the documentary on the history and future of the word…Fu…Fu…well,
let’s just say the F-Word. The doc traces the origins
of the word as far as they can using a series of linguists
(all of whom agree that it has nothing to do with For Unlawful
Carnal Knowledge or other acronyms) and then they go into
the meaning and context of the word in the worlds we all
live in. The linguists were all very enlightening, even
if they played it save almost all the time, but the real
deal of the film came from the cultural interviewees.
There’s
Tera Patrick and her Biohazard husband who talk about a
lot of the meanings of fu..fu..the F-Word and how they connect
to the world of sex and porn. Ron Jeremy also gets a few
words in, and is even more humorous than Tera. The sex portion
is interesting, but it pales to the conservatives they managed
to film. There are talk show hosts, Miss Manners, and even
a congressman, but it’s Pat Boone that really comes
through. He is sincerely anti-Fu..fu..the F-Word and provides
a number of sound bites that are hilarious. The combinations
are really funny. Add to that Janeane Garofalo, Ice-T, Stephen
Bochco and various others and you get a documentary that
goes into the nooks and crannies and really digs deep.
What’s
funny is that the doc does seem to take the route that us
not being able to say fu..fu…the F-Word is a sign
of the arrival of Pink Floyd’s The Wall state.
George W. Bush is certainly the villain of the piece and
several interviewees are fast to point this out. It does
feel like they could have done without that, but it doesn’t
really hurt the doc overall.
It does
gloss over a few things, like only really pointing to N.W.A.’s
Fu…Fu…F-Word The Police from Straight Outta
Compton. I could think of a couple of very important songs
from the time that would be even more important. The look
at swearing in movies, mostly with Kevin Smith talking,
is strong, but not nearly to the depth that you’d
have thought. They mention M.A.S.H. as the first
film that featured characters saying fu…fu..the F-Word
and fail to mention films from the 1960s that ventured into
that territory. They also look at Scarface, which
really was one of the films that brought us Kevin Smith,
Quint and others.
The
two strongest things in the film had to be the interview
segments with Hunter S. Thompson and the section dealing
with Lenny Bruce. Everyone pointed to Bruce and the guy
who brought it all to light, making even middle-of-the-road
folks realize that the naughty words had some power. The
film was dedicated to him. Hunter’s soundbites were
great, and he was one of the most prolific Bush-bashers,
but he was so good and I think that he was interviewed shortly
before his death.
The
filmmakers were the same ones who gave us The
Big Empty (Sonoma Valley Film Festival 2004) and
have put together a film that is controversial and well-delivered.
The good people at ThinkFilm, the ones who gave us The
Aristocrats, are distributing it in the Fall and it’ll
be amazing to see how they deal with marketing a film with
a name they can’t print.
I certainly
hope they do better than I did.
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