Reception
Critical reception was generally negative, with Rotten Tomatoes only gauging 29% positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave it a one-half star rating, criticizing it for excessive use of vulgar language and demeaning portrayal of women, describing it as a "train wreck" and finishing his review by bluntly stating "This film is not in a releaseable condition". Nathan Rabin at The Onion A.V. Club said Pootie Tang "borders on audience abuse" and "confuse idiocy for absurdity and randomness for wit". However, a few years later, fellow A.V. Club writer Scott Tobias revisited the film and included it in his New Cult Canon series, noting that "Pootie Tang repelled mainstream critics and audiences, but it holds an exalted status among alt-comedians and fans of subversive anti-comedy in general".
Kevin Murphy also praised the film in his book A Year at the Movies:
Pootie Tang crosses all cultural barriers to become the dumbest movie I've seen in an entire generation. But it is also funny as hell...Pootie Tang strives for the dumbness it achieves, a feat few films can do...this is a good kind of dumb. Like mooning. Like a cat falling off a table. —Read more about this topic: Pootie Tang
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)