South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is the feature film based on the eponymous cartoon where little kids swear a lot. It stars Trey Parker and Matt Stone, obvs, and Mary Kay Bergman, and cameos from Eric Idle, George Clooney, Minnie Driver, and Brent Spiner.
Right. So. There's this show called South Park. It's mostly about Kyle, Kenny (both Stone), Cartman, and Stan (both Parker), little kids who live in the titular town in Colorado surrounded by a wide assortment of crazy adults. In this movie, the kids of South Park become addicted to profanity from repeated viewing of the movie Terence & Philip: Asses of Fire, and Kyle's mother (Bergman) goes on a tirade to end profanity, largely through pursuing war with Canada (Terence & Philip being Canadian).
In this mix is Satan (Parker), in an abusive relationship with the recently deceased Saddam Hussein (Parker, though he's credited as "himself"). If the blood of the martyrs (that'd be Terence and Philip) touches American soil, Satan comes to Earth and rules in darkness!
Plus, lots of little b-plots. Stan has a crush on Wendy (Bergman) but barfs every time he tries to talk to her. The school Chef (Isaac Hayes) tells him to "find the clitoris" when he asks how to make a woman like him, so he spends the movie trying to do that. Stuff like that.
You know, I own a lot of movies of questionable quality. I own movies that are problematic as shit, either because of content or because of who's involved (like, I wouldn't buy American Beauty today, for both reasons). But South Park is one of the few I'm actually kind of embarrassed that I own.
I'm not entirely sure why. The show is immensely popular. Maybe not as much now as 20 years ago, but it's still very much a cultural touchstone, and, like The Simpsons, it's entered the cultural lexicon in a thousand little ways. And watching the movie again, I can't say there's no talent behind it. There are little sight gags everywhere, and while a lot of them would require knowledge of the show to really get, just as much are little plays on words or bits of absurdist humor. The songs (right, this movie is a musical) are catchy but they don't linger any longer than they need to, and there's clear parody of Les Miserables that actually works because it doesn't just recycle dialog or specifically call out what it's lampooning.
I haven't watched it (the movie or the show, for that matter) in a lot of years. I did watch it on occasion when it debuted in 1997 and thought it was kind of funny back then, when I was in my 20s and could get into the gross-out and the inappropriateness of the whole thing. And honestly, the point that the movie is making specifically - that the MPAA has a bigger problem with profanity than with violence, that there's no oversight to how it demands censorious changes to films - was then and is now relevant (maybe less so now). There was even a documentary about it called This Film Is Not Yet Rated, in which Parker and Stone were interviewed. So viewed through the lens of its time, that is late 90s, when South Parker had only been on for two seasons, the movie holds up.
The problem is that I'm watching it now, in 2023, when Parker and Stone have been doing this for 30 years and have gone from being young and hungry comedians to middle aged rich white dudes who have lived most of their lives enshrined in some very serious privilege, and have spent that time telling other dudes their age that "both sides" of any debate are equally stupid. (This article in Vice lays it out pretty well.) I've often said that about one in six episodes of South Park are really funny, and it's not because they ridicule political or social positions that I identify with. It's that the central message of show seems to be not, as a fan might tell you, "caring too much without critical thought is stupid," but simply "caring at all is stupid."
About the best I can say is that the movie holds up really well considering how mired in the 90s the show is for me (I know they're still making new episodes, and I find it amusing that as Parker and Stone have grown up they've had to eat a bit of crow as they're discovering, that, no climate change is a real thing, it wasn't just environmentalist being alarmist or "gay" or "weak" or "fart joke" or whatever). Also, it amuses the hell out of me that this movie was nominated for an Oscar (Original Song for "Blame Canada") and Robin Williams performed it for the telecast.
My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Oddly high. Like I said, the songs are really catchy
Next up: Spaceballs
No comments:
Post a Comment