it was a great movie, but I had such high expectations that it could never have lived up to ...
this is the best review i've read of the movie ... and the best piece of pop-culture criticism i've seen in a while ... a.o. scott is a genius....
From the New York Times:
By A.O. Scott
Let me be the last to observe that we are currently living in a golden age of satire. While citizens in earlier eras had Walter Cronkite and the "CBS Evening News" to help them navigate contentious and confusing matters of public import, more and more of us seem to rely on Jon Stewart and Comedy Central. Which suits me just fine. I know I am not alone in confessing that my moral and ideological guides for the past half-dozen years have included four foul-mouthed Colorado youngsters made out of torn construction paper. Without "South Park," I would scarcely know what to think about issues like stem cell research, "The Passion of the Christ" or the Pokémon craze.
And so, with an election drawing near â?? on the very night of the second presidential debate, in fact â?? flush with a sense of civic duty, I put on my aluminum-foil Professor Chaos helmet and went to a screening of "Team America: World Police," the naughty new puppet action-musical from the resourceful and confrontational minds of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. I wanted a marionette version of what I get â?? twice a night, sometimes, thanks to TiVo â?? from "South Park": a wholesale demolition of everything pious, hypocritical and dumb in American culture and society, along with a few songs to hum on the way home and a few new ways to appreciate the inexhaustible comic possibilities of flatulence and excrement.
Maybe I expected too much. It's a big country, after all, busy inventing new forms of idiocy every day, and there's only so much a 98-minute movie can cover, especially if the filmmakers have to figure out how to make big-headed, loose-bodied puppets walk, shoot, fight and simulate sex. (Since the movie has an R rating, I'm pretty sure they weren't having real sex, though maybe that will show up in the DVD extras.) So perhaps Mr. Parker (director, co-writer, co-producer and bad celebrity voice imitator) and Mr. Stone (co-writer, co-producer and equally bad voice imitator), aided by a brilliant cohort of puppet-makers and set designers, had to be selective in their choice of targets. They expend most of their spoofy energy sending up action-movie conventions and over-the-top patriotic bluster, reserving their real satiric venom for self-righteous Hollywood liberals (with special attention to Alec Baldwin).
It seems likely, though, that their emphases and omissions reflect a particular point of view. "South Park," with its class-clown libertarianism and proudly juvenile disdain for authority, has always been hard to place ideologically, but a number of commentators have discerned a pronounced conservative streak amid the anarchy, a hypothesis that "Team America" to some extent confirms. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and other left-leaning movie stars are eviscerated (quite literally â?? also decapitated, set on fire and eaten by house cats), while right-wing media figures escape derision altogether. The fact that Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone appeared in "Bowling for Columbine" does not grant immunity to Michael Moore, who is portrayed as an overeating suicide bomber.
Not that the movie is partisan, exactly. Tempting though it must have been, there are no puppets resembling John Kerry, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Edward M. Kennedy. The word Iraq is spoken only by the puppet caricaturing Sean Penn, who brags that he's been there. (The Matt Damon puppet is too dumb to say anything but his own name.) Saddam Hussein, an important supporting player in "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," has been retired from the comic bestiary in favor of Kim Jong Il, who in the movie's scenario (and maybe not only there) is organizing a diabolical plot to arm global terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. (In spite of his accent, Kim, voiced by Mr. Parker, sounds an awful lot like Eric Cartman of "South Park," which makes sense when you consider that Kim Jong Il is pretty much who Cartman wants to be when he grows up).
Opposing Kim's plot are the members of Team America, a squad of square-jawed, multiply talented Caucasians who fly around in screaming fighter jets, speed around on motorcycles and blow up a lot of stuff, including the Eiffel Tower and most of the pharaonic monuments in Egypt.
The team is led by a debonair super spy, Spottswoode, and their newest recruit is Gary Johnston, a Broadway musical performer (first seen appearing in a spot-on, devastating parody of "Rent"), who is recruited for his acting ability. Gary goes through the usual three-act gamut of rivalry (with a puppet whose resemblance to Seann William Scott is surely intentional), romance (with a puppet whose resemblance to Elisabeth Shue is probably not), self-doubt and redemption, much of it set to music. The most inspired song begins "I miss you the way Michael Bay missed the mark/ When he made `Pearl Harbor' " and continues to catalog the parallels between that misbegotten movie and Gary's ill-starred love affair.
But if they mock Michael Bay, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone pay perverse tribute to Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of "Pearl Harbor" (and just about everything else), by structuring their movie like one of his. Considering that it's all done with puppets, "Team America" is sometimes more satisfying as a straight-ahead blow 'em up than as a satire. Goofy as they are, the members of "Team America" are treated, in the end, with affection, even respect, which is part of the film's political gist. When Team America blows things up in other countries, they do it by accident, in the course of their sloppy but zealous fight against the people who want to do it on purpose. This is not a trivial moral distinction, and it is one the film hangs onto in impressive earnest.
The obscene patriotic ditty that is the Team America theme song might be hyperbolic (and impossible to stop singing), but it is not sarcastic. Nor is a speech, delivered twice in the course of the action, most powerfully at the climactic moment, that is meant as an answer both to the Hollywood peaceniks and to the wishy-washy world community, whose representatives have gathered in North Korea for a peace conference.
Because of its graphic (though metaphorical) discussion of human anatomy, I can't quote any of the speech here, but it is one of the more cogent â?? and, dare I say it, more nuanced â?? defenses of American military power that I have heard recently. It is conveyed in language that no politician would dare use, by a puppet speaking to a roomful of puppets, in the wake of jokes about oral sex â?? all of which provides about as effective a camouflage as the pink and blue fatigues the Team America agents wear on their operations.
Of course Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone are joking â?? what else is new? â?? but like most good jokers, they also mean exactly what they say. Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged "Team America" with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.
