Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Washington Blade - October 29, 2004
Steve Weinstein, editor
WARNING: IF YOU don't believe that there can be any humor in the following items, then stop reading now, and by no means should you see "Team America."
The items in question are: France, projectile vomiting, the Broadway play "Rent," AIDS, gay anal sex, gay oral sex, Islamic terrorists, the Arabic language, North Korean dictator Kim Jong II, Asians pronouncing "L" as "R," kitties used as vicious killers, facial hair, Nebraska, the numerical permutations of 9/11, and self-serious liberal Hollywood activists.
These are just a few of the touchstones in this latest tour de farce from the brilliantly immature creators of "South Park." Like that show and their previous feature film, Trey Parker and Matt Stone use male adolescent potty humor as a way to comment on the world's foibles.
Only here, their prey is even larger than in their previous effort, which famously paired Saddam Hussein and Satan as a pair of peevish gay lovers in hell. This time, the boys (and no matter how old or rich they get, they'll always be boys) have set their sights on nothing less than the Bush administration's global worldview.
If this sounds like heady stuff, don't worry. This is, hands down, the funniest film I've seen since the first "Austen Powers," and probably since "Airplane!" in 1980.
THE PLOT CONFLATES "Top Gun," the old "Mission: Impossible" TV series, the James Bond franchise, "Charlie's Angels," and the last three State of the Union addresses into a semi-coherent whole.
A group of superhero government agents thwart terrorists around the world while battling their own emotional entanglements. The hero of the piece is an actor who's whisked away in his starring role in "Lease," a sincerely bad musical that takes place in the East Village.
Sound familiar? When we first meet him, he's singing the triumphant closing power ballad: "Everybody has AIDS/the gays and the straights/you and the pope/the whites and the spades."
You see, the Team America force needs the almost supernatural powers that only an actor can provide. Stone and Parker layer on the satirical nuances. They riff on Hollywood clich s, action-movie tropes and global politics.
They're also equal-opportunity offenders.
Anti-war actors such as Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon are the targets of vicious criticism - although their portrayal is just the way Bush's cronies would see them. (Wait until you hear Penn's description of his pre-war trip to Iraq.)
In the end, behind the laughs, these guys' intentions are deadly serious. The gags, which run nonstop from the studio logo to the end credits, serve to indict the president's entire cowboy approach to foreign policy.
The results are more effective than "Fahrenheit 9/11" - and will probably reach a lot more undecideds. Like the greatest satirists, from Aristophanes to Moli re to Swift, these guys know a target is hit hardest at an angle.
The use of puppets for all of the main characters allows for broad caricatures of everyone from U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to Alec Baldwin, as well as sets that allow the destruction of major historical monuments on three continents.
It also negates any ickiness caused by the violence and bodily functions that permeate the action, not to mention the comic affects, such as sex scenes and those killer kitty cats.
As for the oral sex: Parker and Stone have always approached gay sex as 15-year-olds. They see it as alternately fascinating and repellent. (Lesbians, oddly enough, don't seem to register on their comic radar.) References to gay sex permeate the dialogue more than any Falcon film.
Some of this is trash talk, and some is gross-out stuff. But what's oddly endearing is how well they seem to get it. Remember, these are the guys who dressed in drag and went on the red carpet as a couple when their song was nominated for an Oscar.
041029
WB041030
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