Matt Stone
/
pullsthe strings
Jayplay movie critic Stephen Shupe interviews co-creator of South Park and Team America: World Police.
In the months after Sept. 11, Letterman and Leno looked like they were walking
through minefields. Jon Stewart, in his first Daily Show appearance following the attacks, looked into the camera and wept. Only Trey Parker and Matt Stone saw the absurdity peaking through the solemn shroud of our national mourning. In the first
"I FEEL LIKE I'M HIGH,
LIKE I'M ON SOME KIND
OF WEIRD MORPHINE
DRUG IN THE HOSPITAL
BEGAUSE I'M JUST SO
HAPPY WE GOT THIS
MOVIE DONE"
Good. So what inspired you to make a puppet movie?
episode of South Park that fall, Stan's mom sits day and night watching round-the-clock cable news coverage, the boys are forced to wear gas masks to school, and Osama Bin Laden shows up as an Elmer Fudd-like comic foil to Cartman's Bugs Bunny. It was a brilliant coup de grace, and it proved that something, at long last, hadn't changed.
Now, three years later, Parker and Stone have returned to the big screen with Team America: World Police, a film populated entirely by marionettes that takes on all comers in the war on terror. The dou's previous theatrical effort, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, was a vulgar masterpiece. Once again, the filmmakers' message seems to be that, in an uncertain world, all we can do is keep laughing.
How's it going today Matt?
Pretty good, how are you doing?
It came from watching Thunderbirds on TV. Trey and I were watchin this show a few years ago and it really had such an interesting feel. It's one of those things that they never intended to be funny but now is really funny. So it kind of came from
watching this show and then combining that with wanting to make fun of big Hollywood movies.
What are your feelings about the MPAA ratings battle over Team America's puppet-on-puppet sex scene?
I think the MPAA is a pretty broken organization. I don't think it serves artists very well and I don't think it serves parents very well. Our puppets are not even anatomically correct! They're like Ken and Barbie dolls, and we put them in low positions and rubbed them together. The MPAA had a problem with some of the positions we picked, but it really is one of the most innocuous things in the movie.
Are you and Trey political?
Truthfully, I think Trey and I are like most people; we're kind of down the middle with our political affiliation. With the movie, we tried really hard not to make it bend one way
or the other. In these last three years, most of us have been somewhat conflicted between just being proud to be an American and sometimes being ashamed. It's about those feelings, not about the politics that come out of those feelings.
How much longer do you see South Park playing?
It will slow down when Trey and I slow down, but that probably won't be for a couple, three or four years. I don't think I'll be doing it when I'm 60, but a couple, three or four more years, yes.
One of the most popular episodes from last season was The Passion of the Jew, where Kyle goes to see The Passion of the Christ and Cartman dresses up like Hitler.
That was one of our least favorite episodes last season. We talked so much about what we wanted to say on that episode and we never quite focused it, but there was just a sheer punk rock, fuckeverybody kind of attitude about this show that think people really responded to. The episodes that Trey and I like are always the ones that other people don't like.
Is there another movie in the works?
No, not right now. In fact, I think we've kind of sworn them off after this. This puppet movie almost killed us.
Are there any plans for a full-length
DVDA (Double Vaginal, Double Anal) album?
No, which is bullshit by the way because we would love to do one.
What's holding you back?
Our biggest regret of this whole thing is that we came to L.A. to be in a band and we got sidetracked by this stupid fucking television thing. On this movie, our time was so compressed. There's like six or seven songs in there and usually that would be our favorite part of the whole process, where we would go fuck around and play music. But we just literally did not have time, so we had to have other people do the recordings. They are still Trey's compositions and he sung them, but we literally just did not have time to go in and track our own guitar tracks and drum tracks. That was kind of a bummer and we won't do that again. But we should do a full-length DVDA album. That's what we should do.
I've always wondered what this experience is like when you finally finish a movie and people are seeing it for the first time.
We're just really tired right now because it was like round-the-clock editing to get this thing in theaters. I feel like I'm high, like I'm on some kind of weird morphine drug in the hospital because I'm just so happy we got this movie done.
Team America: World Police (☆☆1/2)
R, 98 minutes, South Wind 12
Blind patriotism gets a surprise celebrity endorsement in Team America: World Police, the new all-marionette satire from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Comedy Central's resident bad boys zero on Jerry Bruckheimer
movies and lefty Hollywood types as they take the idea of America policing the world to its logical extreme.
Team America is struggling in the age of jihad, when search-and-destroy missions result in retaliatory terror attacks. The team recruits a Broadway star named Gary (voiced by director Parker) to spy on a terror cell because he's "a double major in the theater and world languages."
Team America was hastily assembled over a six-month period, and at times the film lacks the rhythm and controlled anarchy of inspired satire. (For perfect puppet madness, see Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles.) It often plays like a straight recreation of Bruckheimer's overblown melodramas. Of course, this is part of the joke, but the laughs emerge from a fundamentally flawed concept - Bruckheimer movies (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) already border on self-parody.
The best scenes feature Kim Jong-il as a lonely
arch-villain who feeds Hans Blix to his pet shark to avoid weapons inspections. He gets to sing one of the film's outrageous musical numbers, some of which match in vulgarity and sublimity the songs featured throughout South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.
Team America practically teases you to be offended, to lose patience with its hip political incorrectness. Near the end, Gary gives a hysterical speech in support of the American war effort, the monologue seems intended to illustrate the filmmakers' point of view. For all of its detached mockery, Team America ends up demonizing "the enemy" in a way that recalls the old Warner Bros. cartoons of World War II. Call it post-9/11 propaganda for the preppie-stoner crowd.
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- Stephen Shupe
Jayplay 10.21.04