My new #1 movie

A guy in my Flickchart Facebook discussion group named Yadsloof Lirpa has recently been touting the benefits of so-called "Fluid Flickcharting." Let me explain what he means by that, but first let me lay a little groundwork for the discussion.

Most of us, when we are ranking on Flickchart, have enough of a sense of the positions of the movies on our chart that we will often pick one movie over another based on the position we know it has, rather than an actual comparison of the quality of the two films. When the two posters come up side by side, you are supposed to choose the one you like better, end of story. But if you know you are picking a movie ranked 253rd against a movie ranked 79th, you have to decide if that second movie is worth entering your top 100. If you don't think it is, you'll choose the higher ranked movie just because you're not ready for the "chaos" that will ensue if you promote the lower ranked movie beyond its means.

It's an easy way for a chart to stagnate, this rigid impression of what belongs where. So Yadsloof thinks you just need to let go of your anxiety and not worry about what beats what, why, and whether this will cause major changes in your chart. Your chart is, by definition, not fixed -- it will never be perfectly accurate, and because you are always adding new movies, it will never be complete. So Yadsloof thinks we should just let go of our preconceptions. Just vote with your heart. Just vote with your gut. And the resulting decisions will get you closer to Flickcharting zen.

Throughout my Flickcharting career I have been one of those rigid Flickcharters, a few exceptions notwithstanding. I have resisted the wanton repositioning of various movies because I fear the cascading effect it will have on other movies. If a lesser movie jumps ahead of better movies through an act of carelessness or the whims of a momentary preference that may be gone as suddenly as it arrives, it will impact all the other movies that movie duels. Now movies that would beat it, but not the movies behind it, will be in the wrong place on my chart. And it's a domino effect with no real end.

But Yadsloof's logic has recently been swaying me. Why should I be consciously molding my chart to my preconceived notions of what it should look like? Why should I be going against my heart?

So I've made a radical change to my approach. And boy is it radical. Ladies and gentlemen, meet my new #1 movie:

That's right, Freddy Got Fingered. The Tom Green vehicle nobody understood. The Tom Green vehicle I didn't understand until a few weeks ago, when I caught it again on TV late at night and was mesmerized.

Having watched this movie a second time, I have no idea how I was so wrong on it. It's a masterpiece of absurdism. It takes all the narrative conventions of a standard comedy -- of many different genres, in fact -- and flicks them in the nose. It's a demented tweaking of everything we hold dear, and its every choice is masterful.

I could break it down scene by scene, but let me just give you a few highlights. The scene where Tom Green plays that marionette synthesizer while wearing a shower cap and slices of meat dangling from his ears is a shrewd deconstruction of the image of the modern rock star. It's absurd, but it's also pointed and incisive. The scene where he swings that baby around by its umbilical cord is a rather literal attack on our modern tendency to be helicopter parents, the circular motion created by the swinging serving as a mirror of helicopter rotors. And that scene where he wears an animal carcass is a biting commentary on the self-seriousness and righteousness of animal activists.

But instead of trying to illuminate the brilliant particulars of Freddy Got Fingered, I should probably tell you how it rose to become #1 on my chart.

It happened simply and suddenly, as the result of one duel. It came up against Raising Arizona, my former #1 ... and it took the victory.

Now, Raising Arizona is a great movie. Don't get me wrong. I rewatched this recently as well, and it reminded me just how much I love it.

But when I put it side by side with Freddy Got Fingered, the philosophy of Yadsloof Lirpa overcame me, and I went with my gut. Fluid Flickcharting told me that Freddy Got Fingered was the superior film. If asked which of these films I wanted to watch right now -- which is always a good tie-breaking method on Flickchart -- the answer dawned on me in a sudden revelation. It would, indeed, be Freddy Got Fingered. And if I would rather watch Freddy Got Fingered than the movie I have been considering my #1 movie for three or four years now, then that meant that Freddy Got Fingered was now my #1 movie.

Look, I am as surprised as you are. Until a few weeks ago, I thought I hated this movie.

But Yadsloof has convinced me that a person's love of film is an ever-evolving enterprise, and there is no clearer example of his philosophy at work than my recent coronation of a new #1. And I feel strangely liberated by this new outlook on movies.

From now on I will believe everything Yadsloof Lirpa says, forwards and backwards.

The complexities of badness

I saw my 2800th movie this week.

You won't be surprised to learn that I observe such milestones. This blog has made my love of milestones abundantly clear. Every time I hit the next multiple of 100, I bold the movie title in my running chronological list. On the off chance you care, number 2700 was Role Models.

Of course, I know when I'm about to hit the milestone, so I have the ability to guide what I see to make it more significant. Like when I decided to make Casablanca my 2000th movie. (Finally putting to rest my shame at not having seen it before age 31).

But I like to see how these things turn out randomly, so I usually avoid doing that. The way things were shaping up, #2800 looked like it was going to be The Wages of Fear, the 1953 French classic that is among the favorite all-time movies of one of my friends. Upon his recommendation, I pushed it to the top of my queue, and it was shipped to me sometime in July. It was finally ready to make it onto our viewing schedule this week, but I got sick, and decided that in my weakened condition, I didn't have the stamina for 138 minutes of black and white and subtitles.

So when I finished my workday on Thursday, a day I was allowed to work from home while trying to kick my illness, I was ready for something light and relatively short. And was sitting on 2799. So randomness wasn't going to enter into it -- I would be directly choosing my milestone movie from all the available titles OnDemand. Those that fit my criteria, that is.

What did I choose? The art accompanying this post has removed all suspense.

That's right, I finally watched Freddy Got Fingered.

I say "finally" because I have been using Freddy Got Fingered as one of my primary examples of cinematic awfulness for years. Any time I need a prototypical example of a terrible movie, I go to that well. In this blog alone, I've already made two references to it, both times placing it on the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum from Citizen Kane. Once, when talking about the 300-word guidelines for my reviews, I said you should be able to stick to that limit whether reviewing Citizen Kane or Freddy Got Fingered. Another time I mentioned receiving an incorrect title from your online rental purveyor, and the fact that you could probably switch out the copy of Citizen Kane they sent you for your own copy of Freddy Got Fingered, and successfully claim it was their mistake.

So, I figured, if I'm going to keep using this film as my whipping boy, at least I owed it a viewing. And, as an extra service to it, why not make it one of my "personal milestones"? Especially since Thursday was the last day it would be available.

It was a calculated risk, because laughing was something I was trying to avoid. Anytime I laughed, it brought on a coughing fit, and those coughing fits usually ended in hiccups. It was a disturbing cycle that had already wearied me.

Then again, I also knew I probably wouldn't be laughing very much during Freddy Got Fingered.

In fact, I think I laughed once. Maybe it was twice.

But Freddy Got Fingered also made me think.

How so, you ask?

Well, it's true that Freddy Got Fingered is, in many ways, a morally reprehensible film, and difficult to endure. There are scenes that are so gross, they violate the sensibilities of even those who don't usually grant filmmakers the power to shock them with cheap stimuli. And certainly, part of what biased most people against the film is that Tom Green was such a shameless fame whore, you didn't want to grant him a smidgen of credit for contributing anything noteworthy to the world. His shtick was so annoying that no one wanted to provide the smallest reward to his avant-garde stunts. If you did, you were essentially saying that doing the most random thing imaginable was some kind of talent.

But I must admit that since finishing the film, I have returned in my mind to various scenes. I do think of Green wearing a suit backwards, and walking toward and away from a mirror, and muttering some ditty about him being the Backwards Man who walks as fast as you can. I do think about him playing some contraption that involves an untuned keyboard and sausages on pullies, singing "Daddy would you like some sausage?" I do think of him wearing a moose carcass on his back, and I do think of him spinning around a newborn infant on the end of an umbilical cord, which he just severed with his own teeth.

But is thinking about them the same as liking them? Or am I just replaying their weirdness in my mind in order to mentally shake my head at them again?

To be clear, I give Freddy Got Fingered a thumbs down. In fact, if I were reviewing it, I would reserve some of my choicest negative language for it.

But I can't deny the fact that it also serves me in a way most movies don't. I am on record as saying I'm interested in any movie that shows me something I've never seen before. That alone certainly doesn't guarantee that I like the film in question, but it does mean that it potentially interests me more than a run-of-the-mill genre film with no distinguishing elements. Even though that film may be ten times more competent than a film like Freddy Got Fingered.

My distinguished colleague who did review the film put it in a very interesting way: "Freddy Got Fingered is in no way a conventionally good film. Nearly unanimous bad reviews found that it was not conventionally well-directed, written, shot, or acted. While this makes the film off-putting for many, it does feel like the movie Tom Green intended to make."

This observation made me realize that there are three reasons we generally hate a movie:

1) The filmmakers failed in their attempt to make a good idea;
2) The filmmakers succeeded in their attempt to make a bad idea;
3) The filmmakers failed in their attempt to make a bad idea.

If #1 is the best and #3 is the worst, Green at least gets credit for being in the middle, for achieving #2. We may dislike his intentions, but no one can say he didn't do exactly what he wanted to do with this film. I bet Tom Green is extremely proud of Freddy Got Fingered. If all he really wanted to do was make us hate his film, it's an unqualified success. If you are really interested in trying to frustrate him, your only choice is to like the film -- but then he's got you there too.

And I'll be honest -- there is something captivating about stuff that is weird just for weird's sake. Green wouldn't be famous at all if there weren't some truth to that. I think the second time I laughed was when he's on a date with his love interest, an amateur rocket scientist confined to a wheelchair, who works in a hospital, loves having her paralyzed legs whacked with a cane, and enjoys giving blow jobs. (Leave it to Green to be subtle). Green's Gord Brody is trying to pretend he's some big-time guy in the finance world, so he plays a phone ringing on a tape recorder, and answers the clunky wireless landline from his dad's kitchen, pretending it's a cellular device. Then screams at some imaginary financial world flunky over some imaginary mistake, ultimately firing him with eyes bulging and spittle flying. Yes, it amused me.

I imagine I will keep processing my feelings toward Freddy Got Fingered for awhile. My distaste for Green's persona still stands. I still think a person should not receive credit for a disjointed story composed of disconnected "shocking" vignettes. I still think a person needs to do more to earn fame.

But, I'm also strangely glad I saw the movie.

So, will I continue to use Freddy Got Fingered as my prototypical terrible movie, in all examples that require such a movie?

Probably.

And I bet Tom Green would be extremely proud of that.