USA
Recognizable Faces:
Pat Boone
Drew Carey
Ice T
Chuck D.
Janeane Garofalo
Ron Jeremy
Bill Maher
Alanis Morissette
Kevin Smith
Hunter S. Thompson
...and many others
Directed By:
Steve Anderson
Being an ESL (English Second Language) person, I'm aware that my vocabulary might not be the most developed. So I use the "F" bomb here and there, to spice things up and get my point across. That and other profanities. Thanks to the English language, Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, I can still manage to be efficient using a minimal set of tools. Now you will understand my intellectual curiosity about the terms I use more often than not, due to my un-Shakespearean range of verbal expression. Despite the fact that he is alive and well, this is the last movie Steve Anderson ever directed , six long years ago (it's an eternity in Hollywood speak). Gee I wonder why! To give you a quick reference, it beats the record of "F" bomb uses in a fiction movie by four times. And there are a lot of movies that say fuck, a lot of times.
Fuck: A Documentary thrives on a bit of a thin ice, but it manages to keep things interesting by turning itself into somewhat of a love letter to the use of profanity in media and taking a stance against the FCC, who underwent a reign of terror during the Bush years. Don't get me wrong, it's still a solid documentary who present both sides of the argument. Conservative intellectuals are giving a right to speech and make a rather good use of it. Steve Anderson gives the reader the choice to pick sides, which is both a sign of strength and of good documentary making. He is confident in his point that saying "Fuck" should be a liberty ,a whole part of the first amendment. Guests such as Pat Boone, Alan Keyes and Janet LaRue make little case about their point and keep saying: "Well you shouldn't say that, because it's wrong, you know?" Boone goes as far as saying he replaced saying "Fuck" by saying his own name "BOOOOOOOOOONE". Their approach is a bit primary-school-D.A.R.E-ish, so not all that convincing.
On the other hand, the most interesting part of Fuck: A Documentary is the historical approach to censorship in America. Steve Anderson goes from Lenny Bruce to Howard Stern, passing by the work of George Carlin to illustrate how the term has come to get accepted as a common part of language, how it was incorporated in hip-hop to show anger and alienation. And of course there's this whole FCC which hunt, involving Howard Stern, which forced him to retreat to Satellite radio. It makes you see another side of Stern. Not the agitator, not the crude comedian, but the man who stands up for the right to say whatever he goddamn wants. At the end of the movie, Anderson calculates for how much his film would've been fined by the FCC and as you could guess, it's ugly. I don't remember the exact number, but it was nine digits long.
But yeah, there are some short parts that really got my attention but as a whole, "Fuck" is pretty thin of a subject to run a ninety minutes documentary with. Once you expose that the "Fornicate Under the Consent of the King" was a hoax first published in Playboy in 1970, there's nothing more to say historically speaking, but to keep saying "fuck" over and over again. If it would have been a documentary about the use of profanity in media as a whole would have made the investigation a little more varied and would have fed the director a lot more tools to work with. Instead, we have an overload of cursing celebrities who explains what "Fuck" means to them. It's funny for fifteen minutes, but it dulls the senses pretty quick. So what does it teach us? That you can't repeatedly swear like that and expect to keep viewers interest into the very word. The irreverent tone also makes it sound like a bunch of stoners having fun, more than anything. Too bad because the structure is there. The tone and the subject are not quite defined in depth. Yeah I'm disappointed, but I'm not too sure what I expected at the first place.
SCORE: 65%
