Trey Parker | And You Thought It Was…Safe(?)

So, if actors are such pussies, how come this one gets to use his magic Acting powers to save the world?

Every morning I thank God we no longer live in that sick, bipolar year of your lord, 2004. Were we still stuck back there, in one of the crappier years of one of the crappiest decades in world history (so far), I’d have to start this review out with an equally crap introduction. Tons of them litter our great series of tubes, all saying the same damn boring things:

“Boy, it sure has sucked, suffering through all these films with explicit political messages. Sure do wish all these filmmakers would just shut the fuck up. How dare they exercise their right to free speech in a supposedly-democratic society? Thank God for Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and their Great Gift, Team America: World Police. It’s a film that gleefully farts in the face of our entire political spectrum. Thank God someone’s finally made a film for apathetic, hipster douchebags whose main source of current events is cable TV news…or award winning satires of cable TV news, Monday-Thursday at eleven, on Comedy Central. (Now where’s my damn check, Paramount?)”

Seems every hack with a movie website cranked one of these out and unjustly tacked them on to reviews of this film. Reading them all in sequence is like reading a series of variant print-outs from some evil artificial intelligence: the Critic-Tron 9000. They may be perfectly accurate descriptions of the South Park episode writer/directors Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Pam Brady turned in immediately after this film premiered (“Douche Vs. Turd”)…but as a description of Team America, they sell the film far too short. Just like I did, at the time. Continue reading Team America: World Police (2004) →

Few things are more informative than the obscure early work of now-famous creative types. Key themes emerge and patterns emerge…often so apparent that, even if my Unrated Special Edition tonight’s film weren’t plastered over with little stickers that read “From the Creators of South Park!”; even if I didn’t know what Trey Parker and Matt Stone look like; even if I had never bothered to read their credits on a single South Park episode, it would still be pretty goddamn obvious, and just as enjoyable to boot.

This sophomore effort from Parker, Stone, and (if the various commentary tracks on this disc are any indication) every friend they had in the world at the time, resounds with themes already touched on in the boy’s (and girl’s) first film, Cannibal! The Musical. Here, as there, expect a preference for gross-out humor and overblown Action movie plotting, dramatic music cues, some stuff that refuses to make sense, and a strangely ambivalent relationship with Mormonism. Meant to be a musical for all of five seconds, this saga of a pornographic, Mormon superhero may just be the best superhero film of the late-1990s, the nadir of Superhero Cinima’s Golden Age. It certainly satisfies the criteria laid out in Peter David’s October 2, 1990 But I Digress column in the Comic Buyer’s Guide, when he called a much more serious movie “the perfect super-hero film of all time.” {More}

For a moment, there was hope

And You Thought It Was…Safe(?)

Tag Archives: Trey Parker

Team America: World Police (2004)

Orgazmo (1997)

For a moment, there was hope