Fuck

As Lenny Bruce famously pointed out, fuck is an important word because, "if you can’t say fuck, you can’t say fuck the government." It’s along this freedom-of-speech bent that filmmaker Steve Anderson interviews people like Billy Connolly, Janeane Garofalo, Hunter S. Thompson, Pat Boone and Ice T to arrive at the history and universal significance of the most simultaneously used and reviled words in the English language. It appears that we have WWII largely to thank for the proliferation of vulgarity in mainstream usage, but the word "fuck" has developed into an essential quip of primal expression that is universally understood regardless of its grammatical usage. With whole documentaries dedicated to taboo words like "slut" and "fuck," we can employ our vulgarities to even more stinging ironic effect.

Not Rated. 93 mins. (B) (Three Stars)