Team America *Contains Dialogue Spoilers

[northwood]

this movie was great. this movie back me remeber the old thunderbirds. *i also remeber a other one puppe tv show. it was in blackwhite.. but i forgot the name of it*
soo anyway, movie was great...FUCK YA!

[MacGuffin]

Paramount has announced that they'll deliver Team America: World Police on 4/5/05. This will be a single-disc edition of the theatrical version of the film. No other details are yet available.

[modage]

ah, the rip-you-off edition, since in just about every interview they said they'd just screw the mpaa by putting all the stuff back in on an unrated dvd.  i guess the studio is waiting till people by this one before they let them release it rick sands style.

[The Perineum Falcon]

From, you guessed it, The Movie Blog:

It's the clickity-click link

Matt Stone never to work with puppets or Trey Parker again

It seems that Matt Stone is tired, very tired. In an interview with the Sun Online (a bastian of modern journalism) picked up by The Guardian, he talks of the pressures of working on Team America: World Police and the negative affect on his life.

Team America faired not so well in the US and grossed a mere $32m (£16.6m) after being much hyped by many as destined to be the comedy hit of the year. Not so in fact, and it is destined for it's European rounds this January, albeit with the Germany release on the 30th of December.

...the 33-year-old Stone has pledged to stay away from making any further pictures with puppets or Parker after describing Team America, which opens here in January, as the lowest point in his life.

Harsh words...and they get even stronger.

"It was the worst time of my entire life - I never want to see a puppet again," Stone told The Sun Online. "It ruined all the serious relationships in my life. You just become a different person, get completely stressed out and don't pay attention to anything else.

"You work 20 hours a day, take sleeping pills to go to bed and drink coffee to stay up. You feel like a piece of s**t, none of your friends like you, your parents don't like you, but you have a movie at the end."

Now that sounds like fun! [Heavy sarcasm] Where does the creativity go blasted on sleeping pills and caffine and probably exceptionally tired and arguementative?

"I don't know why we thought doing a puppet movie would be fun because it was terrible," he continued. "It was really hard because they can't do anything at all."

You'd have thought that they would have investigated how hard it was to work with puppets well before getting into the confines of the movie process.

However, what I didn't know is that the White House declared the movie unpatriotic. Wow, they'll do that to just about anything nowadays.

I don't really know myself if this is a big blow for comedy movies or not, South Park was a great series, but it was one piece of work, albeit a large one. Perhaps these guys will find new things on their own.

[cron]

he / they said the same thing after the south park movie

[Myxo]

haha.. that's hilarious..

[matt35mm]

Matt Stone never to work with... Trey Parker again

If this is true, I'm going to kill you.

Nothing personal.  I'm just gonna have to gut all y'all if we're robbed of this duo.

[The Perineum Falcon]

Matt Stone never to work with... Trey Parker again

If this is true, I'm going to kill you.

Nothing personal.  I'm just gonna have to gut all y'all if we're robbed of this duo.

What ever happened to "Don't kill the messenger"?

[MacGuffin]

N. Korea Wants Czech Ban of 'Team America'

North Korea's embassy in Prague has demanded that the film "Team America: World Police" be banned in the Czech Republic, saying the movie harms their country's reputation, a report said Saturday.

In the film by "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, a team of marionettes rushes to keep North Korean leader Kim Jong Il from destroying the world, reducing world capitals to rubble along the way.

"It harms the image of our country," the Lidove Noviny daily quoted a North Korean diplomat as saying. "Such behavior is not part of our country's political culture. Therefore, we want the film to be banned."

The Czech Foreign Ministy said the film would not be banned in the Czech Republic.

"We told them it's an unrealistic wish," ministry spokesman Vit Kolar was quoted as saying. "Obviously, it's absurd to demand that in a democratic country."

[MacGuffin]

Paramount has officially announced its Team America World Police: Special Collector's Edition for release on 5/17. Also available that day will be Team America World Police: Special Collector's Edition - Uncensored and Unrated. More details on features soon.

[modage]

i really dont like paramounts ugly 'widescreen collection' thingy at the top of all their dvds.  especially when the color is distracting like here and the lemony snickets one.

[Myxo]

Puppet sex!

[MacGuffin]

Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Bringing graphic puppet sex to life. IGN interviews with the masterminds behind Team America and South Park
 
Bawdy humor and celebrity bashing are the signature of comedy geniuses Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Team America can be seen as their ultimate synthesis of the two. In the midst of last year's presidential race, Parker and Stone decided to take aim at the trend of celebrity soap box political speeches, and Jerry Bruckheimer action films were the perfect vehicle for such an endeavor. Oh, and puppets too.

Parker and Stone's Team America takes aim at just about every celebrity who's ever given a political viewpoint. Set like a typical mindless action film, America features an all puppet cast. The heroes are a group known as Team America: World Police. They babysit the world and try to keep it free from terrorists. Celebrities mocked include Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Moore and countless others. The film is paced like a Bruckheimer flick, complete with tough talking dialogue, montages and mocking songs such as America, F*** Yeah! and Derka Derk (Terrorist Theme).

The comedy duo has come a long way since their humble beginnings as animators of an obscure short entitled The Spirit of Christmas. That short inspired the wildly successful South Park, which is currently entering its ninth season, a brilliant musical feature South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and countless toys, stuffed animals and endless trinkets.

IGN DVD caught up with Parker and Stone recently at the Viceroy in Santa Monica to talk about the DVD release of Team America, pissing off Sean Penn and more!

Q. I thought you weren't going to put the pee and poop back?

MATT STONE: We actually thought about not doing it but at the end of the day, I thought it was just really funny. The original thought was not to put it back.

TREY PARKER: Because we had our version of the sex scene, right? And we loved it and it was about two, a little over two minutes long. We were like, 'Oh, this is so great' and I had written a song to go with it and I was just like, 'If the MPAA hacks this up, they're going to hack this to nothing.' So we said let's think of two shots… We'll go shoot two new shots just for the MPAA to cut out… We got everyone on the crew together and I said, 'Hey, everyone. We're going to go do these couple of shots right now. Don't worry, they won't be in the movie. Don't get bummed out because this is really gross, but it won't be in the movie. This is for the MPAA.' Everyone got it immediately, what we were doing. So we did those two shots and of course everybody thought they were super funny when we were doing them. Then we put them in and they were like, 'Okay, send it off to the MPAA,' which is basically, that's what this DVD is. We should have called this DVD the MPAA version. That's what we should have called it because this is the version that first went to the MPAA.

STONE: So the movie is dirtier because of the MPAA.

PARKER: Because we would have never even shot those shots if it weren't for the MPAA. So we sent it off to the MPAA, but they knew us well enough by then that they were basically like, 'You're taking that out and we're cutting out half the sex scene anyway.'

STONE: The MPAA building, they have people scouting for us a mile away. We have no friends at the MPAA.

PARKER: So they did, they hacked this thing. They also made us take out other shots that were just other random positions. And then they made us take out; every shot that we had in there, they made us cut almost to one second apiece or whatever. It just made it feel like the sex scene wasn't a well paced scene and it wasn't what we intended. So when we were going to do the DVD, we're like, 'All right, do we put out our version or do we put out the version that we intended it to be or do we put those two shots in too?' And Matt and I actually totally disagreed for a while about what to do. Matt wanted to put them in and I didn't want to put them in. And then finally, we were making this decision at four in the morning on a South Park night which is a Tuesday night when we're finishing our last South Park before vacation. And I think finally I was like, 'All right, I'm tired.'

STONE: I think Trey just said, 'F*** it.'

PARKER: And now they're in there.

Q. Why is there no commentary?

STONE: I don't think we could do a very good commentary track because by the time the DVD had to be made, it's only like a month or two after the movie and honestly, we're just burnt out and emotionally you're just not at a place where you can really talk well about the movie. I think it would be really kind of an angry commentary track.

PARKER: I think it would be a much more interesting commentary track in a few years. Even the South Parks, we can kind of do them now and even that is limited, because the whole thing about not doing full episodes on South Park was an honest thing of we were sitting there, we'd start the first one and we'd talk about it and do whatever. For about five minutes we'd be like, 'Okay' and then we'd be like, 'I don't know what else to say.'

STONE: I don't think I could talk for however long this movie is. I don't think I have that much to say about this movie.

Q. Even your rambling is funny.

[LAUGHTER]

PARKER: We could ramble for an hour and a half.

STONE: Yeah, we could ramble. I don't know if you ever heard the track to Orgazmo or our early movies that we did. We just got really super drunk. Then we'd talk about the movie for about a half an hour.

PARKER: Then we'd talk about what we wanted to do that night.

STONE: I remember Trey talking about Sting for like 20 minutes. It has nothing to do with anything.

Q. Do you ever get confronted, besides Sean Penn?

PARKER: Sean Penn's really the only one stupid enough to put anything down on paper. It was hysterical… Matt showed me the letter, he's like, 'Dude, check this out' and he's laughing his ass off. And I read it and I'm like, 'You wrote this.' He said, 'No, no, no. Sean Penn really wrote this.'

STONE: We got the letter the day before; like he wrote a letter to us, but it had a PR fax, it had a PR company's phone number at the top. I got it the day before and I was like, 'Oh, wow. Sean Penn sent us a letter.' And we were reading it and we were like, 'This doesn't really sound like it's really to us. It sounds like it's to the world.'

PARKER: But before the movie came out, he had only heard about it. And he didn't realize in writing the letter he was saying the things he says in the movie. He was like, 'I've been to Iraq and I'll take you there.' That's all he does in the movie. 'I've been to Iraq so I know everything.'

STONE: Most people are pretty; even celebrities, most people have a sense of humor. Most of the people we meet who we've done on the show, like it.

PARKER: The people who've come out, it's pretty amazing. I just recently got a letter from Stephen Sondheim saying it's one of his favorite movies of all time. We just got a letter from Russell Crowe saying he loved it. Elton John.

Q. Matt Damon mentioned he was amused by it.

STONE: There's plenty of people who like that. There's plenty of people [where] we actually respect their opinion like Stephen Sondheim or Penn Jillette who love it. Those people, we're like, 'Wow, you liked the movie? That's cool that you liked it.' If other people don't like it, it's kind of who says the opinion too that matters.

Q. When you were writing this, how much of writing Team America is writing an actual puppet comedy movie and how much is it writing an action movie?

STONE: All the first passes of the scripts were all comedies. And then actually, we shot probably the first two days, actually day and a half; in the first week you start realizing you can't, you basically can't do comedy. You have to do super-melodramatic action and then they look like [puppets look] and then that's what makes it funny. That was a huge, that's basically why we had to rewrite the script on a daily basis on set. It's basically, you have to write action.

Q. So you were basically parodying action movies by writing one?

STONE: Yeah, you have to write action. It was tough.

PARKER: It was interesting because we even had scenes, we had a scene that was sort of jokey and had, like, jokes in it. On script it looked like good jokes, you know? And we would shoot that scene and we would watch people watch it and basically the joke would kind of fall flat because a puppet has no comic timing and it doesn't have the little nuances of expression that are necessary to pull a joke off. But then as soon as the puppet was like, 'Oh my God, we're all gonna die' it was like the funniest thing ever. So, we learned quickly. We kind of had to do it that way because if we would have handed Paramount the script that it ended up being, you would have read that script and be like, 'There's no jokes. Is this a comedy?' It's all in the delivery of it.

STONE: It's like the comic thing of it's a hat on a hat.

Q. But what about the songs? Essentially it is an action movie that has some very funny songs in it.

PARKER: Which is Bruckheimer. (Laughs) No but a Bruckheimer…

STONE: These songs are just as funny as Bruckheimer.

Q. Armageddon is just as funny.

PARKER: Exactly.

STONE: All the puppets are basically is that you're watching Day After Tomorrow but you got high. That's it, you know. You watch Day After Tomorrow, you get high, this is what it feels like.

PARKER: When you're watching Armageddon and the Aerosmith song starts… Super funny.

Q. You're writing action scenes as jokes?

PARKER: Yeah, and then we stopped.

STONE: And then we just started writing them as action scenes, but of puppets doing it, and that's what makes it funny. It took us a while to figure that out. And it took us a while, I mean we knew, we kind of knew that, like, the more serious, the better. But we had no idea how serious it would have to be, so we had to make it about, you know, my dad or I got raped by a member of Cats. There'd be a rape and, you know, people dying in each other's arms, I mean that mellow dramatic. Anything less than that felt weird.

PARKER: Our favorite parts of this movie and when we laughed all the time shooting it, was when a puppet just looked at another puppet. Because it was that movie thing we all get. We haven't talked about this actually, but the amazing thing was, we would shoot some of these scenes and we're like, 'Oh man, we shot this just like Bruckheimer did, why doesn't this have…' And then suddenly we took the music, you know the Hans Zimmer music, and we put it underneath it, and you have a puppet just sitting there staring with the strings going [dum dad a] and that's when we're like, 'This is what it is.'

STONE: This movie is a lesson in how movie music lies to you. Take the music out of this and put in some [lame music].

Q. When you're watching the movie you pay attention less because it's not real people.

PARKER: Right.

STONE: That's all Hans Zimmer and those guys too. We actually went to Hans Zimmer's studio when we were doing this, because the guy who did the music works with him. So we actually met Hans Zimmer while we're doing this movie and doing press where we're just ripping on Bruckheimer movies and Michael Bay movies, which is like, Hans Zimmer invented that, you know, kind of musical score. What did he say, he's like [German accent] 'Maybe you guys will put the stake through the heart of this genre finally.'

PARKER: He was super-stoked on it, like 'I'm so sick of doing this.'

STONE: 'I'm so sick of these f***ing Bruckheimer movies.'

PARKER: He got it, he totally got this movie. (Laughs)

STONE: And yet he's got a 15 million dollar studio that's like bought with those movies, but he got it. He's like, 'They send me these scenes,' what was it Katzenberg? Bruckheimer, whoever, I think it was Shrek too. 'They send me these scenes and I'm thinking to myself, you're not really going to have that in the movie are you? But they are, so I score it.' Without the score, you wouldn't even begin to watch these lines, and that's what this movie is about. That honestly is what Team America is about.

Q. Was the montage song always intended for this movie?

PARKER: No, no, no. It was a song for the South Park movie, for the South Park shows that we really loved.

STONE: And we were, following the Bruckheimer structure, we're like 'That's what happens in a Bruck,' now you get to the third act montage.

Q. This is one of the best montages ever.

PARKER: Well it had to be. That was the point of that.

Q. How did the strings on the Tim Robbins puppet not catch fire?

PARKER: They were special, what were they made out of?

STONE: They were made out of Teflon or steel. That was a big concern.

PARKER: They still caught on fire though.

STONE: They still melted and broke. That was really hard to do.

Q. Was America F*** Yeah snubbed for the Oscar?

STONE: Well, I don't know. Snubbed? (Laughs)

PARKER: I think we're just not really welcome there anymore. I think it was before Team America. When we wore the dresses there, there were Academy members that were super not happy with that. So, we weren't really expecting any kind of a nomination.

[Myxo]

Haha.. So true..

STONE: That's all Hans Zimmer and those guys too. We actually went to Hans Zimmer's studio when we were doing this, because the guy who did the music works with him. So we actually met Hans Zimmer while we're doing this movie and doing press where we're just ripping on Bruckheimer movies and Michael Bay movies, which is like, Hans Zimmer invented that, you know, kind of musical score. What did he say, he's like [German accent] 'Maybe you guys will put the stake through the heart of this genre finally.'

PARKER: He was super-stoked on it, like 'I'm so sick of doing this.'

STONE: 'I'm so sick of these f***ing Bruckheimer movies.'

PARKER: He got it, he totally got this movie. (Laughs)

STONE: And yet he's got a 15 million dollar studio that's like bought with those movies, but he got it. He's like, 'They send me these scenes,' what was it Katzenberg? Bruckheimer, whoever, I think it was Shrek too. 'They send me these scenes and I'm thinking to myself, you're not really going to have that in the movie are you? But they are, so I score it.' Without the score, you wouldn't even begin to watch these lines, and that's what this movie is about. That honestly is what Team America is about.

[Stefen]

America!! FUCK YEAH!!!

haha that was the best part really.