Two thumbs down.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged - The Aristocrats - Movie Review

If my recent movie attendance is any indication of the national box office receipts, Hollywood can put a fork in it. They're done. Since Wedding Crashers didn't seem to be about gay marriage, and War of the Worlds and The Brothers Grimm seemed redundant, I only went twice to the tiny Provincetown New Art Cinema all summer.

I did see March of the Penguins, set in the Antarctic, which seemed like a good antidote to the unrelated-to-global-warming, sticky, freaky blast furnace of a summer we had. But despite all the anthropomorphizing going on around me, I could not identify with this film. With its emphasis on procreation, monogamy, and heart-melting scenes of male penguins caring for their young (for three months of the year), the documentary is relentlessly straight. Perhaps that's why it has become the next big date movie among fundamentalists: The Passion of the Penguins.

Then I saw The Aristocrats. And that seemed like a good antidote to the serious world intruding on the crazy, hazy, lazy days of summer. But again, I could not identify.

First, The Aristocrats is not a movie about the Bushes. It is a documentary about the world's filthiest joke and the comics who love it. A show biz family goes to a vaudeville talent agency. The agent asks the father to describe their act. The father proceeds: The family dog is trained to poop in their son's mouth while the boy is copulating with their nine-year-old daughter, and all the while the father is urinating on the mother, and on and on. The agent asks the father what they call themselves. The father says, "The Aristocrats."

The filmmakers, skeptic Penn Jillette and comic Paul Provenza, became re-intrigued with the joke at a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner three weeks after 9/11. At the roast, Gilbert Gottfried, a squinting tummler with a shrieking ferret schtick, was scorching old Hugh. But the crowd was quiet. He made a joke about bombing, then something about 9/11. There were hisses from the crowd. Someone shouted, "Too soon."

Desperate, Gottfried lapsed into the old tried and true and...