Fuck

Steve Anderson’s documentary delves into the origins and myriad uses of America’s favorite four-letter word. Fuck mixes Bill Plympton animation sequences with engaging but largely irrelevant talking-head interviews of comedians, writers, linguists, porn stars, culture warriors and the all-encompassing madness of Alan Keyes. The film is both entertaining and gratuitous, much like the word in question, but Anderson sprinkles enough profanity-related trivia amongst the copious film and TV clips to make Fuck feel like a game of Scene It: Expletive Deleted Edition—you might be surprised to learn, for example, that Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H was the first major Hollywood studio film to drop the f-bomb, or that Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back holds the single-movie record for f-words.