Fuck
April 30th, 2007
Inventive animations, colorful talking heads and well-chosen movie clips illustrate this history of the F bomb, the most powerful taboo word in the English language. Lenny Bruce, Ron Jeremy, Ice-T, and T. S. Eliot weigh in on where, how and why to use it, and it’s all here–from the Nixon Tapes to George Carlin and Howard Stern, Eddie Murphy’s Raw, Scarface, Deadwood and Dick Cheney’s “Go fuck yourself.” I kept waiting for the movie to outstay its welcome, but before I got bored, it was over. Kirby Dick’s This Film is Not Yet Rated makes a more coherent case about institutionalized censorship in the US, and I wish more had been said about the influence of the FCC and the Parents Television Council, but Fuck’s mission is primarily to entertain. Lenny Bruce was right: “If you can’t say fuck, you can’t say ‘fuck the government.’”
Fuck. Steve Anderson, 2005. ***
The U.S. vs. John Lennon
February 14th, 2007
John Lennon’s image, life and work is woven so deeply into the fabric of our shared cultural history that, to me, he’s become almost invisible. For the first hour, this well-meaning documentary on his deportation case treads overly familiar ground — the bed-in, war is over if you want it, power to the people. It’s good to be reminded that Lennon wasn’t a given, could never be taken for granted, but the movie doesn’t really take off until Nixon decides that he was a real threat to the state (and his reelection.) In 1972, Dick took the advice of Strom Thurmond and moved to get the damn peacenik out of the country — but after Watergate and a few counter-lawsuits, Lennon got to stay at the Dakota. In the end, it’s obvious not just to Gore Vidal that the Liverpudlian rabblerouser was more American than the patriotic bullies and wire-tappers.
Curious coincidence: Lennon and I used the same immigration law firm. So for what it’s worth, that’s two degrees of separation. And we all shine on….
The U.S. vs. John Lennon. David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, 2006. ***
[tags]film, gore vidal, documentary, 3 stars, john lennon, yoko ono, nyc, immigration, richard nixon, strom thurmond, illegal wiretaps[/tags]
