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Fuck

(2006) *** Unrated
91 min. THINKFilm.

Steve Anderson gets a lot of people on record about the F-word in his aptly-titled documentary Fuck. If the title offends you, you obviously won't cotton to the 629 utterances of the word, but Anderson does due diligence in examining the history and various contexts for the expletive, first recorded in print in 1475.

The film includes conservative voices, like Michael Medved, Pat Boone (who actually says, "censorship is a good word"), Judith "Miss Manners" Martin, and radio host Dennis Prager (who calls swearing part of a "battle for the soul of society"). Then there are the gleeful profaners, like Billy Connolly, Kevin Smith, Drew Carey, Janeane Garofalo, and Hunter S. Thompson.

The culture war, including the FCC and indecency watchdog groups, gets full coverage, and Anderson examines the word's presence in schools, in the army, in religion ("does God care if we say FUCK?"), at the movies (Meet the Fockers, anyone?), in music (NWA's "Fuck Tha' Police"), in comedy (Lenny Bruce and George Carlin), and even on the moon.

We see the word applied by Bush, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, LBJ, and JFK. An animated linguistic tutorial by Bill Plympton demonstrates the amazing adaptability of the word. Though Anderson occasionally strays into generic censorship issues, his film amounts to—pardon my French--a good fucking time at the movies.

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