ust as Pink Flamingos was a better movie about the counterculture than Easy Rider, Freddy Got Fingered is a better movie about suburban squalor than American Beauty. Not least because its Americana both rings truer and is more affectionate. Joe Dirt is a better movie about native pluck than The Patriot. For that matter, Spike Lee's Bamboozled, which is his version of a gross-out farce, gets deeper into America's racial pathologies than a dignified film could. And, oh, yeah: Josie and the Pussycats is a better movie about media manipulation than The Truman Show, too. So there.
—Tom Carson, "In Praise of Stoopidity," Esquire (August 2001)