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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The new film by "South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker starts off strong, but then resorts to lame anti-left jokes that could have been written by Ann Coulter.
Oct 15, 2004 | Good satire is nobody's friend -- it shows no mercy and has no agenda. But that's not the same thing as not having a point of view. Ultimately, "Team America: World Police," the new puppet satire from "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is so determined not to have a point of view that it cancels itself out in the manner of those CNN "debates" where two talking heads from opposing sides gainsay each other for five minutes.
"Team America" takes on America's war on terrorism -- and like good satirists, Parker and Stone have correctly identified the cant on each side. But instead of picking their way through this poop-laden cowfield, they've chosen instead to refuse all claims. And that stands contrary to the incisiveness and intelligence they display week after week on "South Park," which manages to skewer all sorts of hypocrisy without ever giving in to cheap cynicism. "Team America," for all its outrageousness, is the first work from Parker and Stone that I'd describe as a failure of nerve.
The title "Team America: World Police" neatly sums up the way much of the world looks at us right now, as a rah-rah concern that has taken it upon itself to act as neighborhood cop on a global scale. And the opening sections of the movie are everything you hoped they'd be. Stone and Parker and their co-writer Pam Brady have had the brilliant satirical stroke to treat Bush-era foreign policy as if it were an '80s action movie. It's the unholy marriage of Donald Rumsfeld and Jerry Bruckheimer, complete with power ballads.
Team America, a paramilitary group of government-sanctioned operatives working from their headquarters deep inside Mt. Rushmore, jet all over the world fighting the enemies of freedom -- especially those with turbans and hook noses. In the first scenes, men of that description carrying steel briefcases with blinking lights are all set to carry out their nefarious deeds in the heart of Paris. Enter Team America who defeat them handily -- at the cost of destroying the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre. It's a reductio ad absurdum demonstration of the "it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it" mentality, the thing that's playing itself out right now in Iraq.
"Team America: World Police"
Directed by Trey Parker
Part of what's so funny about the first part of "Team America" is that Parker and Stone have managed to satirize movies that, because they were so vulgar and bullying and ludicrous, seemed to be impossible to satirize. They've got the clichés of '80s action movies cold: There's the tragedy haunting one T.A. member; the talented but unsteady rookie who has his own trauma to overcome, which he will inevitably face at a crucial moment; there's the unexplained resentment a team member feels for the new guy; the tangled romantic alliances, and so on.
The mimicry of the technical aspects of those pictures is note-perfect. The cinematography by Bill Pope (who shot the "Matrix" movies) fetishizes the armature and mayhem on display. When Team America planes zoom out of their mountain HQ, a bad '80s-style number "America, Fuck Yeah!" blasts on the soundtrack. (There's even a slow version, the "Bummer Remix" for a more, uh, introspective moment.) And there's a priceless montage shot on location in Washington where Gary, the rookie, accepts his awesome Team America responsibilities by gazing on the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol building. All the while, a country ballad that goes "What would yew dew for frayh-dom?" plays on the soundtrack. (As "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" demonstrated, Trey Parker is a whiz at musical parody.)
The movie also has a great Bond-movie evil mastermind, Kim Jong Il (or as Jesse Helms once referred to him in the Senate, "Kim Jong Two"). With his chubby cheeks and beady eyes magnified by huge glasses, his elongated forehead and black pompadour, the North Korean dictator looks like the love child of Mao and Conway Twitty. Parker and Stone have used the hoary old trick of having him confuse his L's and his R's, and if you're above laughing at that, you're a better person than I am. (The highlight of Kim's locutions comes in his ballad about the sadness of being an absolute dictator, "I'm So Ronery.")
