Wednesday, August 15, 2001

Dumb Films Say More Than You Think

Just 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)