Free My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin Page A

my favorite scene, Gord delivers his big speech to his wheelchair-bound love interest, Betty (Marisa Coughlan), while “When A Man Loves A Woman” wails on the soundtrack and the deafening roar of a nearby helicopter threatens to drown him out. In moments like this, the film has more in common with early Jean-Luc Godard movies than gross-out Farrelly brothers knockoffs.
    Did I mention all the gratuitous horse cocks? You’d have to hunt down bestiality porn to find so many throbbing horse cocks, or to see a grown man fondle the genitalia of large mammals so flagrantly. Watching
Fingered,
I wondered what the studio notes to Green must have been like: “Do you have to have so many giant animal cocks?Doesn’t the first giant animal cock get the point across? And wouldn’t the lead character be more sympathetic if he didn’t falsely accuse his father of incestuous child molestation? And the part where Betty is called a ‘retard slut’ … isn’t that potentially off-putting to women in the coveted 18-to-35 demographic?”
    In my line of work, it’s rare and wondrous to witness the emergence of a dazzlingly original comic voice. I experienced that sensation watching
Freddy Got Fingered.
If you were to give a talented but deeply disturbed 12-year-old money to make a movie, I suspect it’d be a lot like this one. I’ve never seen anything like it. Green’s directorial debut has balls of such unprecedented size and grandeur that they should be mounted and displayed at the Smithsonian.
    I think it helps to see
Fingered
less as a conventional comedy than as a borderline Dadaist provocation, a $15 million prank at the studio’s expense. It didn’t invent the gross-out comedy, but it elevated it to unprecedented heights of depravity. Sure, it seems to have killed Green’s film career, but oh, what a way to go.
    Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success
    Hippified Book-Exclusive Case File: Skidoo
    The secret dream of the ’60s counterculture was that the sexual and psychotropic revolutions rocking the free world would free squares and hippies alike. That quixotic hope resonates throughout the cinema of the late ’60s and early ’70s, a hippified belief that if the Man would just drop acid or indulge in a pot brownie or two, his consciousness would undergo a glorious transformation. He would morph instantly from Richard Nixon to Wavy Gravy. Millennia of guilt, shame, and repression (or as I call them, the Holy Trinity of the Jewish male psyche) would melt away, leaving only an ecstatic puddle of bliss. That myopic belief in the power of drugs to engender radical,dramatic spiritual growth is ever present in movies like
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
and countless lesser works, like Otto Preminger’s notorious, strangely fascinating 1968 debacle
Skidoo.
    The hippie dream promised a utopian paradise of open minds, plentiful mood alterers, copious nudity, a universal ban on the harshing of mellows, and government-imposed universal body painting. To middle-aged heterosexual men, it suggested something even more mind-blowing: guilt-free casual sex with nubile, obscenely flexible young women who’d been freed from guilt, self-consciousness, and inhibitions.
    The counterculture boasted three potent cultural hydrogen bombs—pot, acid, and sexy hippie chicks of easy virtue—in its bid to seduce squares into grooviness. There was the deplorable practice of smoking marijuana, a consciousness-expander infinitely more powerful and mellow inducing than the Man’s scotch, but burdened with none of the debilitating side effects—no hangovers, no addiction, no withdrawal, no DTs or hallucinations.
    It’s difficult to understand the ’60s without dropping acid at least once. The first time I dropped acid—at a punk-rock show at my college co-op, appropriately enough—I suddenly understood, on an almost cellular level, the hippie