story here

Not that I was looking forward to it.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so I ended up watching some Letterman and Leno. The filmmakers were on Leno’s show; the clip they showed, of Hans Blix challenged Kim Il-Jong, was mildly amusing, but no great shakes. It may work better in context of the whole.

As for the rest of Leno’s show, he had Dennis Miller come on as his lead guest, and the guy hasn’t backed off one iota from his wildly and unapologetically pro-Bush routine. The guys in the audience cheered wildly, but I envisioned a large segment of the audience sitting on its hands. But I loved it.

Miller just isn't even funny anymore imho and not just b/c of the change of political perspectives.

I think it's so stupid to give this movie an NC-17 for silmulated puppet sex ... give me a break! Have all the violence you want, but obvious joking puppet sex ... no way?

The MPAA is messed up ... I often think our Puritanical ideas cause MORE harm than good in this culture or ours.

I think, Darrell, that you just catapulted into the 'Top 5 Tag Lines for Threads' category.

Then to have more fun, Trey and Matt replaced the composer they worked with on the South Park movie with Harry Gregson-Williams.

But here's the catch - he's got less than two weeks to produce a complete score.

Yikes.

Clint M wrote:
: But here's the catch - he's got less than two weeks to produce a complete score.

Yikes. The film opens in nine days, and the preview screening is scheduled to take place in just seven days (I've already got my pass). That's just ONE week from today.

Weird to hear that the earlier composer, Marc Shaiman, had written songs for this film, too -- his music for the South Park movie was fantastic, and I can't imagine they'd want to get rid of ALL his music. Maybe it's just the underscore that's being replaced?

Saw it. Kind of liked it. Though it doesn't quite rise to the heights of the South Park movie -- the songs, in particular, are less impressive than they used to be. Still, plenty of good laughs scattered throughout the film, even if there is a certain crudeness behind many of them.

Twitch has seen it...

Also, the Drudge Report has a memo from Sean Penn to Parker and Stone. It doesn't address the film specifically, but more the duo's general attitude towards the war.

One curious thing about this film ... remember how the original teaser rattled off a long list of names of people who would be upset by this film? Almost all of those people make an "appearance" in this film ... but NOT George W. Bush or John Kerry. I found it just a wee bit odd that neither of the presidential nominees was depicted here, or even referred to in any way, at least not that I recall.

opus wrote:
: Also, the Drudge Report has a memo from Sean Penn to Parker and Stone. It
: doesn't address the film specifically, but more the duo's general attitude towards
: the war.

Heh, Penn displays the precise sort of pompous, ignorant self-importance that the film mocks so well. At first it seems Penn is simply encouraging people to learn about the issues and cast a vote, but then it becomes clear what he is REALLY saying is that a vote for Bush is a vote for "the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world," as though these things weren't already going on in Iraq, and arguably in greater numbers, before Bush came along.

One thing I didn't like about the film so much was the way it portrayed Michael Moore as a suicide bomber. I don't think the scene rings all that true, because it doesn't reflect the Moore we have seen in film after film, the Moore who makes lots of money by capitalizing on leftist grievances -- I highly doubt that Moore is the sort to sacrifice his life for this or any other cause.

Interestingly, the film begins in a vein which kinda slams everybody -- the team that flies around the world to stop the terrorists ends up doing way more damage than the terrorists themselves would have done. But near the end, a character delivers a hilariously crude speech which breaks the world down into three basic political groups, and it kinda justifies what Team America does, while admitting that groups like Team America can be too, uh, hard on people sometimes.

Politically ambivalent, methinks this film is -- though hardcore anti-Bushies like Penn will probably think the film is too right-wing.

Salon interviews Matt Parker and Trey Stone (requires registration, or just use the free day pass)

South Park guys pull big strings
The catch is that [Sean] Penn had no objection to being lampooned in the film. Instead, his complaint was a comment [Matt] Stone made to the press that maybe people who don't know what's going on in the current presidential election shouldn't vote. "On the one hand, it seems like he's pissed off in that letter, but on the other hand, there's nothing he could have done to help us out more than send a letter out to the newspapers," Stone said. "We're on the front page of everything again right now." [Trey] Parker, who is 34 and looks like, well, every graduate-student Boston Red Sox fan on Earth (smart, funny, low-key white guy in jeans and T-shirt), said, "if Sean Penn thought that getting more people to vote meant getting George W. Bush elected, he'd be like, 'Don't vote!'" . . . The Chiodos supervised a large crew of top-shelf puppeteers who had to be convinced when Stephen Chiodo instructed them to purposefully have the puppets act badly. Team America: World Police is not a film Pixar might have made. You can see the puppets' strings, their lips don't synch up to the dialogue, and the puppets can't walk properly -- all of which was done in the search for the suitably absurd tone of the film. "What you've got to understand," Chiodo said, "is how much talent and craft it takes to make puppets act this badly." . . . Stone's animosity toward [Michael] Moore stems from his experience working with Moore on the Oscar-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. "I did an interview for Bowling for Columbine, because I'm from Littleton (home to notorious Columbine High School) -- he asked me to do it, I met him a couple times and that's it. People think we did that (extremely South Park-looking) animation that comes after us in the movie, but we didn't. It's so anti-American and mean, and I was just bummed out because people thought I did that." . . . [Parker: "]That's about the strongest statement we want to make: we (America) are not as bad as Kim Jong Il."
Globe and Mail, October 14

Parker and Stone were interviewed by Deborah Norville tonight (now there's a scene ripe for a South Park parody) and they actually impressed me with some of their insights about celebrities and the "vote or die" mentality. They pointed out that these movements never talk about the responsibility of learning about issues and choosing wisely, just "go vote." One of them suggested renaming the "vote or die" movement "vote or I'll kill you."

Then Norville asked them why they dislike Barbra Streisand so much, and they retold a story about Streisand threatening to boycott Colorado in response to state legislation a few years ago. I've never been a big fan of SP, but after seeing these guys talk about the celebrity messiah complex and some of their insights about politics, I'm eager to see Team America.

I really do think there are always great points to their humor often ... and it's quite intelligent really. Of course they balance that out with a fart joke here and there. They don't pick sides either ... they are equal opportunity maker-funner-of-ers

Movie rocked! Reviews are submitted and when they're posted online, I'll provide the links...

Update: Hollywood Jesus review here...

Ebert:

It is interesting that Ebert would interpret the film's refusal to take sides as nihilism while Sullivan would interpret it as sanity.

FWIW, I was asked on TV last week what the film might be saying about America, and IIRC, I replied that the film was lampooning American arrogance -- both the arrogance of those who represent military might AND the arrogance of those who represent alleged cultural enlightenment (in this case, the Hollywood stars who think their celebrity makes their opinions matter). In this, I think "both sides" do have something in common, and I can't fault the film for exploiting that.

And I think Ebert is quite wrong to say that, as far as this film is concerned, the world situation simply doesn't matter -- I mean, really, while everybody's all getting steamed about Iraq, this film puts North Korea back in the spotlight (a point that might play into anti-Bush hands), and it even makes what I think is a very perceptive point about how terrorists want to make the entire planet a "third world" region (a point that might play into pro-Bush hands).

I found myself hoping people would actually come out of this film thinking about those things. When they aren't fondly recalling the non-stop-vomit scene, of course.

Peter:

A young couple take their three young children to see "Team America"...

Team America has secured a '15' from the British Board of Film Classification. The summary of the film's content is a work of genius in itself:

"Contains strong language, violence, sexual references and puppet sex"

Phil.

Surprisingly, there weren't any small children in the theatre when I saw it. Maybe it was because I saw it at 10:30 PM. To be honest, I have seen my fair share of children at R-rated movies...with their parents. When we've seen these "stupid parents" bringing their kids to the likes of "Old School", "Red Dragon" and, most notably for us, Sean Penn's "The Grudge" (a film about a cop hunting for a maniac who tortures and kills children...there was a whole row of kids with their parents, I assume...not a kid looked older than 12 years old!), my wife and I just look at each other and shake our heads in shame.

Ken, my favorite part of the film is the montage scene/song. It still makes me laugh just to think of it.

During the puppet-vomit scene, my friend very, very nearly fainted from hilarity. He was kind of quaking silently, and afterwards said that he was in real pain but could do nothing about it. But whereas I liked the vomit scene tremendously, I hated the puppet sex scene, because for me it never really came out the other side. The bit that creased me up more than anything was the "Aww no! Hans Bwix!" scene.

I never discussed it at the time, so here is a delayed reaction:

I'm not sure I agree that the film is not nihistic. I felt (and I can't really back this up other than to say that whole thing just felt this way) that they didn't really care enough about anything in the film. In some ways the final speech is brilliant, because it seems so well articulated, and yet unimaginably digusting at the same time. But it also felt a bit too distanced from the dilemma that it outlines, too uninvolved, and that gave me real feeling of distaste as I watched. I guess the subject of the film is not Iraq at all, but rather the media presentation of the war, of the different justifying/prostesting discourses surrounding it, and so on, but it's not really about a real situation, and doesn't really attempt to be. I almost felt a bit sick after the last scene (seriously), and its been bugging me ever since. Maybe its because they had obviously worked on that speech, thinking about how they could sum up for/against/violent synthesis dialectic in the most vulgar way possible, making it last long enough so it can, as you say, leave the line far enough behind to be funny, and yet despite the cleverness of it (and it is peversely clever) it feels so detached and unmoved, and almost self-congratulatory, as if they are quite proud of the clever/gross-ness of it. Maybe I took it all too personally, I dunno.

In summary: I wanted them to care, at least a bit, but I don't think they did.

edit: I just looked back at the thread, and noticed that all this has already been said. Not just the same words, but the same words in a similar order. So I apologise. Is there a suitable punishment for people like me?

Started to watch this last night, turned it off after 20 minutes. The contrast between seeing puppets and hearing the F-word every few seconds was too much for me. And the scene in the limo where the head of Team America jokingly asks the actor to perform a sex act on him, and...

Well, there were parts that were funny, but the crudity was just too much.