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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Beneath the veneer of fake dicks and fart jokes, it's really a righteous paean to saying whatever the hell you want.
Jul 2, 1999 | "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" is a movie about freedom of speech and of expression, about courage in the face of oppression. But that's just a lure to get you into the theater -- these days it's hell to attract an intelligent audience into a movie rife with fart jokes, fake dicks and bad language. So, for the record: "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" is ultimately so enriching, it could change your life, and will no doubt become a staple of civics classes for years to come.
Now about those fake dicks: They're real! But not really -- they're photographic images cut out of paper. You see them when Saddam Hussein, who's died and become Satan's lover in hell, starts waving them around from under the bed-clothes, threatening poor Beelzebub with all kinds of untold pleasures of Eros. Let your freak flag fly, we say.
But not even those fake dicks penetrate to the core appeal of the "South Park" movie, a collaboration between Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the hugely popular Comedy Central show. (If a distinction must be made, the fart jokes are even funnier.)
"South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," is a surprisingly cohesive piece of filmmaking -- really. It's never a good idea to hold out much hope that a half-hour animated program will translate well to the big screen: The herky-jerky, minimalist animation of "Beavis and Butt-head" (entertaining enough in 30-minute wedges spliced with video footage) proved too slack to sustain a feature-length movie. Beavis and Butt-head are characters designed to be watched from a slumped-down position in a chair at home, the kind of thing you use to numb yourself out after a day of punching cash-register (or computer) keys -- or the kind of thing you watch if, God forbid, you find yourself wasted in the middle of the afternoon.
But "Bigger, Longer & Uncut" -- even more so than the show from which it was developed -- demands attentiveness. Maybe it's more correct to say that it commands it. If you're feeling distracted and fuzzy, a song like "Uncle Fucka" (one of several big musical numbers in "Bigger, Longer & Uncut") is just the thing to snap you back into the world of the living, whether you find the hedonistic abandon of the lyrics ("You're an uncle fucka, yes it's true, no one fucks uncles quite like you") offensive or not. The protests of educators and learned dweebs to the contrary, "South Park" -- both the show and the movie -- isn't slacker entertainment, the kind of anti-stimulation you seek when you want to close yourself off from the world. It requires a certain level of engagement to key into "South Park's" miniature universe of anarchy. At its most basic level, it's about the freedom and exhilaration of saying whatever you want. People who've programmed themselves to forget how lush and naughty it felt to say, "Fuck!" for the first time obviously wouldn't get it.
