AICN Previewhttp://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=17970
QuoteThe film opens with a shot of an obviously fake backdrop with a badly drawn Eiffel Tower, nothing realistic about it. A fairly awful puppet comes walking out in front of it, and I had a moment where I thought, "Oh, god, is it all going to look like this?" Evidently, when they first screened the footage for Paramount executives, the prankster spirit that is alive and well in the guys led them to make sure that this was the first shot they saw from the entire production, prompting one executive to actually yell "Oh, god, they fucked us!"
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fffmedia.ign.com%2Ffilmforce%2Fimage%2Farticle%2F531%2F531532%2Fteam-america-20040719101831675.jpg&hash=ccec91053c677785ebd7f8dcc6a226923682b705)
More Pictures Here...may be taken down soon...
http://joblo.com/forums/showthread.php?s=f3df82afb8a75c5627020354d3649764&threadid=79889
You guys should implement that Fav Movie info down one's avatar like Joblo's forum.
Not that i'd use it, but it would be interesting to see how many users would choose Magnolia. Come to think of it , that's not interesting at all.
The pics that were taken down can be found here now:
http://www.spschat.com/TeamAmerica/TeamAmerica.html
Trailer here:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/team_america/
:) heh...hehehe... :) hahahaha... :-D HARHAHAHAHAHA :lol:
oh god was that a matrix reference?? WHY???????
it might be better if the world actually blew up before this is released..
Cant wait for this one. The little that Ive read about this movie has had me in stitches. Looks absolutely hilarious.
Quote from: Pubrickoh god was that a matrix reference?? WHY???????
it might be better if the world actually blew up before this is released..
I think the level of irony pushes it into the funny field, JUST IMHO GUYS
The craftsmanship in this looks stunning.
It also looks stunningly hilarious!
I am Jack's anxious eyes for this one. Good call on the irony.
They're already choosing sides over 'Team America'
Fearing the new film is another swipe at Bush, conservatives fire first. Source: Los Angeles Times
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.calendarlive.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2004-08%2F13743797.jpg&hash=87d51cb40698daec46d48dcea24ef2d00fe30c18)
“If there’s one thing this movie ridicules,” says co-producer Matt Stone, “it’s America’s enemies, not America.”
Conservative commentators have begun lining up to denounce "Team America: World Police," the cheeky comedy due in October from "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But it's actually Hollywood liberals — and one well-known producer of big-budget action movies — who might have the most to worry over the take-no-prisoners movie.
"Team America" is being criticized as yet another broadside against President Bush from Hollywood liberals. But a key conceit of the Paramount Pictures movie, which is essentially an action film made with sophisticated marionettes visiting exotic locations, is that it depicts left-leaning show business elites as selfish and superficial.
Among the many prominent activists who may be shown in a less-than-flattering "Team America" light are Ben Affleck and "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore. Says Parker: "We only went after people who at least invited it."
The movie also spoofs many action-film conventions, from editing to dialogue, established and perfected by Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of such blockbusters as "Con Air," "The Rock" and "Armageddon."
"The joke of this movie," says Stone, "is that it's a big, dumb Bruckheimer movie, done with puppets."
All the same, the five action heroes that make up "Team America's" terrorist-fighting "world police" and their various enemies are hardly the crude marionettes familiar to viewers of the 1960s TV series "Thunderbirds." Stone and Parker's one-third-scale puppets are elaborately designed and costumed. The dead-ringer puppet of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, for example, wears tiny eyeglasses fitted with precisely ground lenses. The film's locations include scale models of Paris, Mt. Rushmore and the Panama Canal.
Parker and Stone, whose past humor targets included everything from Mormons to Canada, say Bush isn't even central to the "Team America" story. But that doesn't mean some critics already are attacking the project, which will hit theaters Oct. 15.
On Aug. 1, conservative Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge posted a story under the headline "Paramount Puppet Movie to Mock Terror War." The articled quoted a "senior Bush advisor" condemning the film as "unconscionable" for making fun of terrorism. Drudge reported that a character from the film is "an apparent Bush look-alike," when in fact the image Drudge posted was of Chris, a martial-arts expert in the titular crime-fighting organization.
Reacting to the Drudge Report item, "Team America" producer Scott Rudin says: "I think he misinterpreted where the politics of the movie actually lie. It's not Bush-bashing. It's not Kerry-bashing. It's going after everybody."
Less than a week after the Drudge Report item appeared on the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reported that Move America Forward, a conservative group whose website features criticism of "Fahrenheit 9/11," also was blasting "Team America" sight unseen.
The group's chairman, Howard Kaloogian, was quoted as saying it would be "inconceivable" for filmmakers to have spoofed the Nazis during World War II.
"That's totally ridiculous and absolutely, historically wrong," says Stone, noting that wartime Bugs Bunny cartoons had Bugs in battle against the Germans and Japanese. "It's what everybody did."
More to the point, Stone says, it's possible for satirists to make fun of world events without minimizing the gravity of such topics as war and terrorism. After the first war against Iraq, Stone notes, he and Parker cast Saddam Hussein as Satan's gay lover in their Oscar-nominated 1999 movie "South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut." By so doing, Stone says, he and Parker were neither defending Hussein nor minimizing his menace.
"This movie exists as a metaphor," Stone says of "Team America." "It's not about politics. And if there's one thing this movie ridicules, it's America's enemies, not America. There's a difference between a political satire and what everybody has been feeling for the last few years."
Among the film's chief villains is Kim Jong Il, who throws U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix into a huge aquarium, where he is promptly ripped to pieces by a shark. Some Hollywood celebrities don't fare much better in the film.
"When this movie is over, a lot of people will be confused about what side we're on," Parker says. "That's OK, because we're confused too."
"FLASH: The current version of the PARAMOUNT film TEAM AMERICA is a guaranteed NC-17, with surprisingly graphic scenes of puppet sex..."
ok i'm in.
Quote from: A Matter Of Chance"FLASH: The current version of the PARAMOUNT film TEAM AMERICA is a guaranteed NC-17, with surprisingly graphic scenes of puppet sex..."
Serious?!?!
yes, puppet sex is the real deal now.
Here's the interview link:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/teamamericaworldpolice.html
Quote from: mogwaiyes, puppet sex is the real deal now.
Well shit, I've been having it for years.
Quote from: ...& IQuote from: mogwaiyes, puppet sex is the real deal now.
Well shit, I've been having it for years.
I hear puppets are really into fisting.
:wink:
Oh, and please refer to them as artificial people.
Quote from: MacGuffinI hear puppets are really into fisting.
Let's hope they use a strong detergent.
Full Trailer Here (http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/team_america/)
besides, it's probably not even a Matrix reference. it COULD be, but
_________ this!
has been around for a lot longer than the Matrix
yeah, the irony is more evident upon hearing more dialogue.
such as "maybe feelings are feelings cos we can't control them"..
Launching a small-scale offensive
The "South Park" gang is back with more of its raunchy, irreverent shtick. But this time they recruited puppets to do the dirty work. Source: Los Angeles Times
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimages.calendarlive.com%2Fmedia%2Fphoto%2F2004-09%2F14183449.jpg&hash=f8bcb6552854f837e524abc92bc501118cecef4a)
The Taj Mahal wasn't built in a day, and it looks as if it's going to take much longer than that to torch it.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of the "South Park" TV series and movie, are scurrying to finish their next film, the action satire "Team America: World Police," and the Taj Mahal isn't making their destructive work any easier. The movie's central conceit — it's performed by one-third scale marionettes dangled over miniature sets — has been far easier to dream up than execute, and with two weeks left to complete principal photography for its Oct. 15 premiere, Stone and Parker are running out of time, money and energy.
Like the most hackneyed Hollywood popcorn movie, the world will go up in smoke unless Team America's crime-fighting puppets single-handedly come to the rescue. Stone and Parker's villain puppet, Kim Jong Il, is as ruthless as he is diminutive, and is laying waste to familiar sights spanning the globe. The North Korean leader already has obliterated London's Big Ben and Paris' Louvre. India's onion-domed landmark is the next to be vaporized, assuming Parker and Stone can figure out how to blow it up.
For the better part of an August morning on a Culver City soundstage, Stone has rehearsed a sequence intended to turn an enormous scale Taj Mahal model into rubble, but what sounds like a teenage pyro prank is proving much more complicated than that. The movie sends up show business clichés whenever possible, and the filmmakers are trying to jam in as many visual allusions as feasible. Stone, who co-wrote "Team America" and serves as its second unit director, wants the Taj Mahal scene to be a recognizable homage to the nuclear shockwaves leveling Baltimore in "The Sum of All Fears."
"It's a great explosion," Stone says of the "Sum of All Fears" blast. "It's probably the only good part of the movie."
Stone loads a "Sum of All Fears" DVD into his laptop and reviews the key scene with co-writer and director Parker, who is filming another "Team America" segment on an adjacent set inside the same soundstage. Special-effects technicians have ringed the Taj Mahal replica with compressed-air canisters designed to generate a sequence of debris-filled shockwaves that will wipe out the innocent marionettes strolling past the Islamic shrine. After a quick safety speech, the fireworks begin. A smoky explosion rips across the stage with a roar, the lifeless puppets collapsing in a tangled mass in the Taj Mahal's reflecting pool.
"Damn it," Parker says, punching his director's chair as the scene is replayed on a video monitor. "One puppet screwed up the whole shot."
The video replay reveals that the instant the explosion hit, the hands of one of the scene's six puppeteers flinched just a few inches, sending his marionette skyward a split second before the shock waves arrive. What's more, the debris is out of scale, and the explosion isn't bright enough. It seems absurd to say, but the sequence looks … fake.
Even though "Team America" is by outward appearances a feature-length joke, the film is painstakingly well made, from intricate costume designs to high-speed chase scenes performed in remote-control cars. One tiny "Team America"-scale Uzi cost $1,000 to construct, and Kim Jong Il's eyeglasses are made with hand-ground prescription lenses.
Given their obsession with detail, craftsmanship and whatever passes for verisimilitude in a puppet movie, Stone and Parker immediately realize that as hopelessly overcrowded as their remaining production schedule might be, they must redo the whole Taj Mahal scene.
"This movie is a nightmare to shoot," says Stone. It's not just explosions that have proved challenging.
To ensure Paramount would give enough money to maintain high production standards, Stone, Parker and producer Scott Rudin waived their collective fees of some $7 million.
"There is nothing in the world," a weary Parker says, "that would ever make me want to make another puppet movie."
A method to their madness
People unfamiliar with the work habits of Stone, Parker and longtime writing partner Pam Brady might assume the trio simply guzzles enough beer and takes sufficient bong hits until crazy ideas start flowing. How else to explain "South Park's" episode "The Passion of the Jew" or the show's turning Saddam Hussein into Satan's gay lover?
But a few days with Stone and Parker on the "Team America" set proves that underneath their frat-house fascination with language and sexuality so coarse it might make John Waters blush, they take moviemaking quite seriously. The "Team America" production boasts some of the top artists in every trade: Cinematographer Bill Pope is coming off "Spider-Man 2" and "The Matrix" movies, while pyrotechnics supervisor Joe Viskocil worked on "Independence Day" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day."
It's easy to forget Parker and Marc Shaiman's "Blame Canada" song from 2000's "South Park" movie was nominated for an Academy Award (Shaiman also is "Team America's" composer).
Stone, Parker and Brady spent nearly two years perfecting the "Team America" script. For influences, they studied scores of recent action and disaster movies, from "Alien" to "Top Gun" to "S.W.A.T." To help shape the film's archetypal heroes (from the true believer to the reluctant hero to the guy who sells out his friends for greater glory), they read Joseph Campbell. More than anything else, as they constantly reworked the script, they asked themselves questions. Are puppets inherently silly? How are Jerry Bruckheimer movies emotionally moving and manipulatively silly at the same time? Can serious be funnier than funny? And what is America's role in world affairs?
"On one level, it's a big send-up," Brady says. "But on another, it's about foreign policy. It's pretty trippy."
"Team America's" narrative was primarily motivated by Stone and Parker's fascination with producer Gerry Anderson's "Thunderbirds" television series from the 1960s and Hollywood's increasingly formulaic summer movies. The former presented a cool but underutilized storytelling technique, while the latter offered an easy satire target.
"The joke of this movie is that it's a big, dumb Bruckheimer movie done with puppets," Stone says earlier in the shoot, as he and Parker prepare to blow up the Panama Canal, drowning every Panamanian and burro in sight.
"What we really wanted to do was film a Bruckheimer script, word for word, but with puppets. And then we wanted to do 'The Day After Tomorrow,' but there were some legal problems with that."
They settled instead on the story of a mostly gung-ho police force stomping out terror around the world. As Team America dispatches global enemies, its sometimes heavy-handed tactics generate international scorn, eventually prompting self-centered, left-wing celebrities (are there any other kind?) to denounce the crime fighters. Michael Moore leads a demonstration against Team America, while stars like George Clooney and Ethan Hawke help keep the superheroes captive.
Just as the "South Park" movie ultimately made a statement about the dangers of censorship, "Team America" may not be as mindless as it appears. Uninformed "Team America" critics previously have attacked the filmmakers for belittling President Bush and his war on terror, even though Bush isn't in "Team America" and the film ultimately recognizes America as a superpower while mocking its movie stars.
"When the Iraq war started, the celebrities really took center stage," Brady says. "It was so frustrating. Every time you wanted an expert, you got Janeane Garofalo instead. It's about time someone stood up to celebrities."
As soon as filming began, Parker and Stone, who jointly supply many of the characters' voices, labored to find the right comic tone. The movie, they quickly realized, had to take itself earnestly, because it already is a gag.
"Puppets doing jokes is not funny," Stone says. "But when you see puppets doing melodrama, spitting up blood and talking about how they were raped as children, that's funny."
Simply getting the puppets to perform more than a herky-jerky walk, though, was nearly impossible. Having a character do something as basic as knock back a drink would take half a day, even though the filmmakers hired the very best three-dozen marionette operators in the world. (At least all the film's "actors" always were willing to work long hours, and didn't demand personal trainers, low-carb chefs and shiatsu masseuses.)
"There are so many things that haven't worked," says Parker. Rather than rely on computer-generated special effects added in post production, the filmmakers are trying to capture every stunt live on film. "People may think it's the easiest movie in the world, but it's the hardest thing we've ever done," says Parker, who with Stone also made the movie "Orgazmo" and the TV series "That's My Bush."
It's natural to assume crafts such as costume design and set decoration would be a snap because everything is so small. The truth is exactly the opposite: The tiny scale, when projected on a giant multiplex screen, magnifies the smallest miscue. Altering a very small sports coat requires a neurosurgeon's delicate touch, and then you must accommodate the puppeteer's strings.
"On human-sized clothes, you can hide some things. Here, you can't," says costume designer Karen Patch, whose credits include "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "School of Rock." "I have to look at the costumes under a magnifying glass."
In a nod to children's books such as "I Spy" and "Look-Alikes," the movie sets and costumes are filled with repurposed everyday objects. Belt buckles are made from coins, water towers from garden hose bubblers, palm trees from shredded dollar bills. The bar in Team America's sleek, modernist headquarters is stocked with airline-size mini liquor bottles.
"We are really interested in craftsmanship," says visual consultant David Rockwell, who has designed Nobu restaurants, W Hotels and Cirque du Soleil and is making his movie-design debut on "Team America." Despite (or perhaps thanks to) all the subliminal design teases, he says, "you believe the world is realistic."
Under the radar
When Stone warns that the "Team America" footage he's about to show might be "personally distasteful," you can't help but lean forward in an editing room chair to see what's coming next.
Stone and Parker famously battled the Motion Picture Assn. of America over the rating for 1999's "South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut," narrowly missing the adults-only NC-17 mark. If the MPAA's ratings board is still drawing breath after the conclusion of "Team America's" raunchy sex scene, it is certain to give the film an equally restrictive rating.
That, of course, is the plan.
By including scenes so raw they can't even be outlined here, Stone and Parker are offering the MPAA a diversionary Trojan horse. Once they excise the sex scene's conclusion, their thinking goes, "Team America" should collect the less limiting R rating.
That won't fully protect the film from offending, however. Like "South Park," "Team America" couldn't be much more politically incorrect; the film's foreigners, for example, speak not their native languages but heavily accented gibberish.
"I think 10 minutes into the movie, people will say, 'You really are going to do the whole … thing with puppets?' " Stone says. "And you are either going to get into it, or you are going to bail."
I'm getting more and more excited for this movie. I think these people are geniuses.
BIG COOL INTERVIEW: http://www.infocusmag.com/04october/puppetryuncut.htm
Puppet Sex Leads to Rating Rift
The filmmakers behind 'Team America' want to get an NC-17 cut to an R, but the MPAA objects to an explicit scene. Source: Los Angeles Times
They call it puppet love.
But the folks who determine film ratings call it NC-17.
The filmmakers behind "Team America: World Police," an action-genre satire featuring a team of muscular marionettes that save the world, are butting heads with the Motion Picture Assn. of America over the film's proposed rare rating, which would bar admission to anyone younger than 17.
At the heart of the dispute is a scene in the film that shows simulated sex between the puppets. Thus far, the production team has submitted the scene nine times — each progressively less graphic — to the MPAA board, said Scott Rudin, the film's producer. Each time, the MPAA insisted that the NC-17 rating would remain unless further cuts were made, the filmmakers said. The MPAA did not return phone calls late Monday.
"It's something we all did as kids with Barbie and Ken dolls," said Trey Parker, the film's director and co-creator of the animated TV show "South Park." "The whole joke of it is that it's just two dolls flopping around on each other. You see the hinges on their legs. [The MPAA] read into it way more than we ever did…. They said you can't do anything but missionary position."
Among other things, the offending material includes shots of a male puppet simulating oral sex. The production team has already excised explicit scatological puppet sex acts in its attempt to gain an R rating, allowing entrance to teenagers under 18 when accompanied by an adult.
"There's nothing we're asking for that hasn't appeared in other R-rated movies, and our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show them doing, all they'd get is splinters," Rudin said.
"I can appreciate the ratings board has a responsibility to its constituents. But it's incredibly enervating for us as it must be for them to have to be going through this nine times."
To help Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures, which is distributing the film, argue its case, Rudin commissioned his staff to prepare a 45-page memorandum featuring such R-rated films as "Eyes Wide Shut," "American Psycho" and "In the Cut," all of which had comparable sex acts, albeit performed by humans.
A Paramount spokesman declined to comment.
The MPAA decision has financial as well as artistic implications; an NC-17 rating limits a film's audience and thus its box-office potential.
The ratings fight is particularly tense because the filmmakers are contractually required to deliver an R-rated film, and "Team America" is due in theaters Oct. 15. That deadline is complicated by the fact that the studio is planning a sneak preview this weekend as part of its marketing campaign and the ratings issue must be settled.
The raunchy, politically incorrect film is written and directed by Matt Stone and Parker, the writing-directing team behind "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut."
That 1999 film, which featured a humorous sendup of the film ratings system, was also the subject of a protracted and very public ratings battle with the MPAA but ultimately got an R rating.
"Team America" features violent scenes in which a Tim Robbins puppet is set afire and a Susan Sarandon puppet is dropped off a 20-story building — all acts that passed MPAA muster.
"We blow Janeane Garofalo's head clean off, [but for the MPAA] it's all about the positions of the dolls having sex," Parker said. "It's not funny — it's tragic."
The last paragraph sums it up.
Reined-in puppet love earns an 'R'
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Puppet love lives in Paramount's "Team America: World Police," though the film's creators have had to trim back the movie's puppet sex.
According to Paramount Motion Picture Group vice chairman Rob Friedman, filmmakers Matt Stone and Trey Parker received an R rating Tuesday for their political satire that features a cast of marionettes.
The rating comes after a drawn-out battle with the MPAA's ratings board over a scene that depicts simulated sex between puppets. The board initially gave the film, which centers on an international police force fighting global terrorism, an NC-17 rating.
But because of contractual obligations that require the filmmakers to deliver an R-rated product to Paramount, the production team submitted the scene with various alterations to the board 10 times before it agreed to an R rating.
The sex scene, which shows a male puppet simulating oral sex, has been trimmed, though Friedman would not give details as to what was cut to achieve the pared-down rating. The R rating will be accompanied by an MPAA explanation citing "graphic, crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language all involving puppets."
Paramount was under pressure to solve the ratings question because it plans to screen the film in 800 theaters this weekend as part of a national sneak preview. The studio faced a deadline today for placing ads in newspapers nationwide to advertise the sneaks.
Without the R rating, Paramount would have been forced to pull the sneaks from their scheduled dates.
The film goes into national release Oct. 15.
Quote from: MacGuffinReined-in puppet love earns an 'R'
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Puppet love lives in Paramount's "Team America: World Police," though the film's creators have had to trim back the movie's puppet sex.
According to Paramount Motion Picture Group vice chairman Rob Friedman, filmmakers Matt Stone and Trey Parker received an R rating Tuesday for their political satire that features a cast of marionettes.
The rating comes after a drawn-out battle with the MPAA's ratings board over a scene that depicts simulated sex between puppets. The board initially gave the film, which centers on an international police force fighting global terrorism, an NC-17 rating.
But because of contractual obligations that require the filmmakers to deliver an R-rated product to Paramount, the production team submitted the scene with various alterations to the board 10 times before it agreed to an R rating.
The sex scene, which shows a male puppet simulating oral sex, has been trimmed, though Friedman would not give details as to what was cut to achieve the pared-down rating. The R rating will be accompanied by an MPAA explanation citing "graphic, crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language all involving puppets."
Paramount was under pressure to solve the ratings question because it plans to screen the film in 800 theaters this weekend as part of a national sneak preview. The studio faced a deadline today for placing ads in newspapers nationwide to advertise the sneaks.
Without the R rating, Paramount would have been forced to pull the sneaks from their scheduled dates.
The film goes into national release Oct. 15.
The MPAA = Lucifer.
'TEAM AMERICA' DUO FEELS STING OF SEAN PENN PEN
Sean Penn isn't mad about how he's portrayed in the upcoming film "Team America: World Police." But he's ready to go to war with the filmmakers over some off-camera comments about voting.
The film, a satire of the action genre featuring a team of butt-kicking marionettes, has already engendered criticism from figures on the right, who have claimed that it makes fun of the war on terror. Yet the film also takes swipes at a number of outspoken left-wing celebrities such as Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and Penn, who's shown opining about how great Iraq was before the war, with rivers of chocolate and children playing with gumdrop smiles.
Earlier this week, the Oscar-winning actor, who made a trip to Iraq before the war, wrote an angry letter to "Team America" filmmakers Trey Parker and Matt Stone. "I never mind being of service in satire, and silliness," he wrote.
What was offensive to Penn, though, was when Stone said in Rolling Stone, "If you don't know what you're talking about, there's no shame in not voting."
"It's well to joke about me and whomever you choose," added Penn. "I do mind when anybody who doesn't have a child, doesn't have a child at war, or isn't or won't be in harm's way themselves, is encouraging that there's 'no shame in not voting.' "
Penn concludes his letter with a pejorative expletive, and adds as an afterthought a personal invitation to show the filmmakers around Fallouja and Baghdad. "When we return, make all the fun you want," he wrote. Penn declined to comment.
Stone, the film's co-writer and producer, says he was "incredulous" when he received the letter. "I was so surprised. Basically, it's some sort of alien logic. He said that he's not mad at all at us starring him or using his name." According to Stone, what he was actually suggesting is that people should get informed before they vote. "There's this whole concept that you should be ashamed if you don't vote. The only shame is if you're uninformed, on either side, and haven't looked at the issues, and you feel like you should still vote. Encouraging uninformed people to vote doesn't help our country," he said.
Despite the dust-up, Stone insists that Penn does a great job in "Team America." "He has a couple of good scenes in the movie. Even as a puppet, he's a great actor."
here is the letter
To Trey Parker and Matt Stone,
I remember a cordial hello when you guys were beginning to be famous guys around Hollywood at some party. I remember several times getting a few giggles out of your humor. I remember not being bothered as you traded on my name among others to appear witty, above it all, and likeable to your crowd. I never mind being of service, in satire and silliness.
I do mind when anybody who doesn't have a child, doesn't have a child at war, or isn't or won't be in harm's way themselves, is encouraging that there's "no shame in not voting" "if you don't know what you're talking about" (Mr. Stone) without mentioning the shame of not knowing what your talking about, and encouraging people to know. You guys are talented young guys but alas, primarily young guys. It's all well to joke about me or whomever you choose. Not so well, to encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world. The vote matters to them. No one's ignorance, indcluding a couple of hip cross-dressers, is an excuse.
All best, and a sincere fuck you,
Sean Penn
P.S. Take this as a personal invitation from me to you (you can ask Dennis Miller along for the ride as well) to escort you on a trip, which I took last Christmas. We'll fly to Amman, Jordan and I'll ride with you in a (?) 12 hours through the Sunni Triangle into Fallujah and Baghdad and I'll show you around. When we return, make all the fun you want.
Holy mother of God, this must be the best movie about terrorism ever made.
That's really all I can say. And there's an excrutiatingly profound scene involving vomit.
I don't think Sean Penn gets it... has he seen the movie?
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanHoly mother of God, this must be the best movie about terrorism ever made.
That's really all I can say. And there's an excrutiatingly profound scene involving vomit.
I don't think Sean Penn gets it... has he seen the movie?
QuoteSean Penn isn't mad about how he's portrayed in the upcoming film "Team America: World Police." But he's ready to go to war with the filmmakers over some off-camera comments about voting.
Quote from: POZERQuote from: Jeremy BlackmanHoly mother of God, this must be the best movie about terrorism ever made.
That's really all I can say. And there's an excrutiatingly profound scene involving vomit.
I don't think Sean Penn gets it... has he seen the movie?
QuoteSean Penn isn't mad about how he's portrayed in the upcoming film "Team America: World Police." But he's ready to go to war with the filmmakers over some off-camera comments about voting.
mmmhmmm
Quote from: POZERSean Penn isn't mad about how he's portrayed in the upcoming film "Team America: World Police."
That's what the
article says, but the full letter is a little more bitter and sarcastic, don't you think?
Quote from: Sean PennI remember several times getting a few giggles out of your humor. I remember not being bothered as you traded on my name among others to appear witty, above it all, and likeable to your crowd . . . When we return, make all the fun you want.
Maybe I'm just bitter because I know this movie is doomed to be misunderstood, because I think it's much more than
Quote from: Sean Pennsatire and silliness
Wow, Sean Penn can't write very well.
So Jeremy, I guess you've seen this? Anything else to add about it? I mean, along the lines that it's more than "satire and silliness," because it looks to me like that's what it is, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I didn't think it was opening until next week, and then I find there was one screening in my town tonight, and I missed it. Oh well.
Quote from: ono.So Jeremy, I guess you've seen this? Anything else to add about it? I mean, along the lines that it's more than "satire and silliness," because it looks to me like that's what it is, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I didn't think it was opening until next week, and then I find there was one screening in my town tonight, and I missed it. Oh well.
I was also surprised by a sneak preview... I caught it in time.
I think the movie is far more cinematic and visual than the trailer suggests. It actually looks like it was harder to make than a human live action movie. The puppets are absolutely captivating, and the only reason they're there is to magnify the absurdity of everything.
And there's like a trinity of satire, three different levels of irony... one for Team America, one for the terrorists, and one for the celebrities... which I'm still trying to get straight.
The scenes where Team America goes into battle are the most poigniant and stinging. This is really one of the best movies I've seen this year, and I think it should be taken seriously.
It's also really, really, really funny (except for most of the Kim Jong Il stuff).
Quote from: ono.I didn't think it was opening until next week, and then I find there was one screening in my town tonight, and I missed it. Oh well.
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanI was also surprised by a sneak preview... I caught it in time.
Quote from: On Tuesday, MacGuffinParamount was under pressure to solve the ratings question because it plans to screen the film in 800 theaters this weekend as part of a national sneak preview. The studio faced a deadline today for placing ads in newspapers nationwide to advertise the sneaks.
Without the R rating, Paramount would have been forced to pull the sneaks from their scheduled dates.
This was brilliance. It was the best thing i've seen all year. Maybe in all the last two years. I'm still too excited about it to give constructive opinion, but hopefully you will all see it and judge for yourselves. To tide things over, here's a letter from Sean Penn from thedrudgereport, typos and all:
Quote
Hi, I'm Sean Penn. I didn't require any training for my role in "I Am Sam"
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww2.filmweb.no%2Fmultimedia%2Farchive%2F00013%2FSean_Penn_i_I_am_Sam_13301a.jpg&hash=e4ceb2b2f13b341d5be21eef2f3a01e1063e39c3)
Yes, that was posted like five posts up. Guess you missed it in your excitement. Much like I missed Mac's posting about the sneak previews. Guess I just never thought one would actually pop up where I live.
No, it's okay, he can post it again. I'll forgive him
Sal
I'll forgive you
I'll forgive you, Sal.
Why are you responding to Sal? He obviously won't read it.
yeah but his mother will.
my mom just told me. Problem FIXED. Sorry folks!
this sounds great. unfortunately i wont be able to see it in the theatre until march. australia sux :(
It was indeed brilliant. Brilliantly hilarious. I don't think it's as complex as JB makes it out to be, though...I guess you could look at it on multiple levels, but it seemed to me to simply be an exagerated Bruckheimer film in which the stupid patriotism often depicted in such production is carried to a logical conclusion (everyone getting pissed when America saves the day by fucking everything up). The actor stuff was just making fun of all the self-serious Hollywood pundits, who I'm sure do get on the nerves of some people -- I don't mind them, and I approve of actors useing their position to speak up politically, but I understand completely where Stone and Parker are coming from and found it hilarious. Sean Penn's letter only proved their point.
And while the satire is great and astute, I can't stop laughing about (SPOILER) the oral sex and the vomit. Call me lowbrow, but those moments, particularly the former, were something else.
My only problem with it was that Bush and Cheney weren't shown with all the other world delegates. While America is nicely slaughtered on the whole, I felt it would only have been fair for them to be there.
Also, the head of Team America is named Spottiswoode, and I just KNOW Matt and Trey were watching Tomorrow Never Dies, directed by Roger Spottiswoode, and marveled at how goofy that name is, because I did the same thing myself.
Where the hell do I start?
This movie was amazing.
The vomit was hilarious. The whole "Promise me you can't die." "You know I can't do that..." "I'd make love to you right now if you were to promise me that." "I promise I'll never die." and of course, the following scene. The theme song, the Pearl Harbor love song, this movie was damn near flawless comedy. The fight at the beginning where they just rub the puppets together and then one falls down. Hilarious. The whole LEASE take-off.
I tried to just pick my favorite part and put it in white, but there are still more, and I practically named the whole movie.
I highly recommend this film.
http://imdb.com/name/nm0453535/
'Team America' Takes on the World
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fus.movies1.yimg.com%2Fentertainment.yahoo.com%2Fimages%2Fent%2Fap%2F20041011%2Fnyet378_film_team_america.sff.jpg&hash=78345ee73d1b5de26f5af5cb7813003c59980fc9)
Sometimes Trey Parker and Matt Stone are trying to make you laugh, and sometimes they're trying to make you squirm. The "South Park" creators do all of the above with their new film, "Team America: World Police," which narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating by trimming a hardcore sex scene between puppets.
"Team America" is inspired by the old "Thunderbirds" puppet sci-fi adventure TV show. Parker and Stone, who delight in pushing the limits of both comedy and taste, borrow the format to mock the Iraq war and Hollywood blow-up epics like "Con Air" and "Armageddon."
The movie follows a squad of marionette heroes who fight terrorists (never mind that they reduce Paris and Cairo to ruins in the process). They recruit a Broadway actor, Gary, as an undercover operative. But Gary isn't always on board with their aggressive ways yet he's tired of Hollywood liberal whining and, hey, somebody's got to stop North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il from destroying the world, right?
Parker and Stone had puppets made of President Bush and John Kerry, but ultimately cut both characters from the movie, saying they didn't want it to be blatantly political.
"For us, it's a way to think about all the emotions behind the politics," Stone said. "It's not so much, 'Here's what we should do. ...' Gary is supposed to (represent) all the emotions that we've felt over the past couple years (about America's role in the world.) Are you proud? Are you ashamed? It's probably a combination of both."
Parker and Stone don't feel they have much to add to political discourse in general.
"I think the only thing we do assert is that it's fine and good for everyone to hate us (Americans) and think we're (jerks), but there is a big difference between (jerks) and (psychos)" like Osama Bin Laden, Parker said substituting profane body-part slang for his descriptions.
Body parts were conspicuously absent from the puppet sex scene the marionettes have only a network of joints and hinges awkwardly bumping and grinding. After the scene was cut, the movie ratings board gave "Team America" an R.
"It's still funny," Stone said if the scene, "but nowhere near what it was. The scene itself is so funny and innocuous. It's not mean-spirited. It's not edgy. It's just what kids do. We all did that with dolls growing up."
Old college friends Parker and Stone are mostly tickled by what they see as the silliness of the ratings board decision. Parker points out that the pervasive gruesome violence such as the gory, bullet-riddled bodies of puppet celebrities didn't raise any eyebrows.
The old phrase "equal opportunity offender" applies generously to this movie, which attempts to place the world's population in three groups: sissies represented by Hollywood peaceniks like Tim Robbins and Michael Moore; jerks played by hard-charging "My country, right or wrong" nationalists on the "world police" team; and psychos terrorists, dictators and global criminals.
In "Team America," jerks need the sissies to keep them in line, and sissies need the jerks to protect them from psychos.
Overall, the movie is just meant to provoke people, regardless of their politics.
"That's much more interesting than, 'Here's what we think!'" Stone said. "We don't know anything about foreign policy or anything. We don't know anything about anything."
"We make cartoons," Parker added, with mock feebleness.
So far only one celebrity they lampoon has lashed back: Sean Penn, who entered their comedic cross-hairs when he made a trip to Iraq and then published ads denouncing the then-impending American attack.
In the letter, the Oscar-winning "Mystic River" star said he didn't "mind being of service, in satire and silliness" as a character who becomes a pawn of North Korea's super-villain, but took issue with Stone on another matter.
In a recent Rolling Stone magazine article, Stone mocked hip-hop mogul P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" registration campaign, saying he didn't think "uninformed" people should be encouraged to go to the polls.
"It's all well to joke about me or whomever you choose," Penn wrote. "Not so well, to encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world."
Stone claimed Penn misunderstood him.
"My whole thing is I just wish uninformed people would just stay home," Stone told The Associated Press. "If you don't know who you're going to vote for, there's no shame in not voting."
Parker said he was just grateful for the free press Penn gave them by sending his letter to the Los Angeles Times: "It's really funny because in the letter he's really unhappy with us, and yet he couldn't have done anything better for the movie. Now we're on the front page again!"
They reserve their harshest treatment, however, for "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore but their disdain is as much personal as political.
Stone, who is from Littleton, Colo., agreed to talk about his hometown and the infamous high-school shooting there for Moore's anti-gun documentary "Bowling for Columbine."
"We have a very specific beef with Michael Moore," Stone said. "I did an interview, and he didn't mischaracterize me or anything I said in the movie. But what he did do was put this cartoon right after me that made it look like we did that cartoon."
Parker and Stone still harbor hard feelings about that sassy, anti-gun cartoon because they feel it was done in "South Park" style. They believe the proximity to Stone's interview misled some fans into thinking they had done the cartoon, even though Moore never said they did.
For this slight, Moore's punishment in "Team America" is extreme: he's depicted as a gibbering, overweight, hot-dog eating buffoon who straps explosives to his body to blow up the American do-gooders. The puppet was reportedly stuffed with ham when it blew.
Cruel? Certainly. Unfair? Yes.
But the "South Park" guys like to make you squirm.
Quote from: picolashttp://imdb.com/name/nm0453535/
My love/hate relationship with IMDB has reached an all time high.
Quote from: MacGuffin"We have a very specific beef with Michael Moore," Stone said. "I did an interview, and he didn't mischaracterize me or anything I said in the movie. But what he did do was put this cartoon right after me that made it look like we did that cartoon."
Parker and Stone still harbor hard feelings about that sassy, anti-gun cartoon because they feel it was done in "South Park" style. They believe the proximity to Stone's interview misled some fans into thinking they had done the cartoon, even though Moore never said they did.
For this slight, Moore's punishment in "Team America" is extreme: he's depicted as a gibbering, overweight, hot-dog eating buffoon who straps explosives to his body to blow up the American do-gooders. The puppet was reportedly stuffed with ham when it blew.
Cruel? Certainly. Unfair? Yes.
But the "South Park" guys like to make you squirm.[/size]
That's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)
Quote from: HedwigThat's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)
Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanQuote from: HedwigThat's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)
Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).
What about the bomb-strapped-to-himself, thing?
(MINOR SPOILERS)
I actually thought that was absurd enough that it wasn't offensive. Like the fact that the terrorists say nothing but "durka durka Allah jihad."
Quote from: Jeremy Blackman(MINOR SPOILERS)
I actually thought that was absurd enough that it wasn't offensive. Like the fact that the terrorists say nothing but "durka durka Allah jihad."
The latter is a satirical comment on the stereotypes of muslims since 9/11, or someshit.
The Michael Moore bomb-strap thing sounds a little different -- 'cause they have "very special beef" with him.
(Sorry for this fanboy crap...)
I haven't seen this movie yet but once I do, I'm sure I'll love it. I don't like South Park but I LOVE the concept, plot, etc. and the trailer is hilarious.
And Matt Stone DID offer some intelligent comments in BFC. And Trey Parker is a brilliant, hilarious, cool kind of guy. So, hey.
You know?
EDIT -- Also, in that interview a few pages back Stone says, "I'm just unsure of how real that 'news' was" or something to that effect -- about F911.
Quote from: Hedwig'cause they have "very special beef" with him.
(Homer style):
Mmm. Very special beef. (drools)
Good interview at Latino Review (http://www.latinoreview.com/films_2004/paramount/teamamerica/trey-matt.html). Really long.
At what point in the making of the film did you say, what the hell were we thinking?
TREY: Every single day. Literally, as soon as we even did the first test shoot. We had to do a research and development phase, which was about a year and a half. We did several test shoots and we kept trying to shoot this one scene over and over, which was the first dressing room scene where Gary meets Spottswoode. We tried to just shoot that because we figured it's just two puppets, they just talk, it should be easy, and the first time we tried to shoot that scene, it took about 28 hours and we never got it, and the second time, it took about 27 hours, and we still never got it. And already, we were already in pretty deep money-wise. Paramount had to spend so much money just making these puppets and these sets, and we were like...Oh, Dude, we're never going to make it. Like there's no way. This movie is impossible to make, and then, as we got into shooting the film and even deeper into the money and we got to these gigantic sets and 12-13 puppets, it was just obvious that what we thought we were going to accomplish we weren't going to accomplish. We had to massively rewrite every single day to make it something accomplishable.
MATT: Trey and I feel like it's a huge accomplishment that we got anything on film that kind of resembles a movie. It was tough.
What age is appropriate to see the movie?
MATT: 13's borderline.
TREY: I think you should be 23 or 24. Honestly, we definitely told our friends who had 14 year olds to leave them at home. I think around 15, but again, it depends. There are extremely immature 16 year olds that shouldn't see it and extremely mature 14 year olds that will probably be alright. That's why it should be up to an adult. That's why it should be up to a parent. That's why the NC-17 rating is kind of ridiculous, because a parent should be the one that decides and knows what their child can take.
What did you cut back on? What did you think was too offensive to leave in the film?
MATT: Really nothing, to tell you the truth. Doing this movie is a little bit different from South Park. Doing this sort of subject matter with terrorism, we were concerned with some of the early draft about how a 9/11 joke would go over, but then when we screened it, people loved it. It just showed that even though these are serious themes and serious subject matter, it doesn't mean that for a little while, in a puppet movie, we can't all laugh and release some of the pressure that we've all felt. When every day you open the paper and it's like "The world is ending" and you're like "Oh My god" and this movie is really just supposed to be a pressure valve for that stuff. So really we didn't find any subject matter we didn't want to satirize, it was just doing it in a way to achieve that purpose, not doing it in a way that was offensive. Ultimately, we want people to laugh at the movie, so it was just finding that tonal balance.
TREY: The balance, too, for us, is we never like to come across as cynical. Because we're both very optimistic guys and I think that with South Park especially, we try to always have some kind of underlying sweetness and underlying heart to it all. There is optimism simply in laughing. If we were to find out that we had cancer tomorrow, we would be making a joke about it. That's how we deal with things, it's how we think about things and so do a lot of people. I think that's why people respond to it. And there are a lot of people that have no sense of humor that don't understand that. That say if you're making fun of something, it simply means that you absolutely don't care, you don't think about it and everything is trite to you. It's totally not true.
Talk about working with the Chiodos, the guys that designed the puppets.
MATT: The Chiodos are awesome.
TREY: The Chiodo Brothers, they produced the puppets, and made the puppets and got the puppeteers together. They were the entire puppet department. Nothing like this had ever been done before, and they just completely took the ball and ran and rose to the level that it took to do it. They were heroic really.
Was it difficult to shoot the puppet sex scenes? What did you cut to avoid the NC-17 rating?
TREY: It's about 50 seconds long now and it used to be about 23 or 24 minutes long. It was probably twice as long as it is. And really, it was just a lot of the shots you saw were longer and then it had a few extra special positions of lovemaking that showed they really loved each other. The MPAA decided that you all weren't adult enough to see that.
MATT: That was the only thing in the whole movie the MPAA had a problem with...the puppet sex.
TREY: Which is pretty funny, because it was one of the easier things to shoot because it was something we've all had experience doing as children, taking the G.I. JOE and the Barbie and doing it.
MATT: All you do is stick them together and it works.
When did you guys decide to make this film with puppets?
TREY: It was about two years ago and we were watching Tech TV. They were doing repeats of "Thunderbirds". We both had the same reaction. We remembered the show. We were like "This is really cool", the fact that everything was handmade and everything. We sort of talked about how it was a cool thing because it was animation, but it was live action. That was the appealing thing to us being animators. It was a totally different thing we could do. We were going to do a puppet disaster movie and a few different things. Then we just started adding real people into it, like Hans Blix and Kim Jung Il and then we just decided to make the whole setting political.
How long did it take to make all the animatronic heads?
TREY: A year and a half maybe. Because we went through a big stage of R&D (research and development) where the first heads came back and because the technology had changed so much since the Thunderbirds time, servos have gotten smaller. They were able to really get these articulated heads that did all these things and we kind of went "No, no...Pull it back", because it started to look like Chucky almost.
MATT: And we knew how awesome the Chucky movies were. We didn't want to step on their toes.
TREY: But we knew from South Park...On South Park, we just have a big oval and two circles and all the characters, if you take their clothes off, look exactly the same. But we knew from doing it for nine years that all you need are the right eyebrows and the right mouth shape and you can get across any emotion. So we said, "Take all that stuff out. Just give us all the control we can over eyebrows and mouth shape and we can get all of the emotions across."
When Jerry Anderson first went to make the puppets, he went to the person who made glass eyes and it was the first time that he made two eyes that were the same. Was that important to you to get the eyes right?
MATT: The eyes are probably the most important thing that are humanlike. I don't know where they got the eyes, but I think it's from a glass eye maker.
TREY: We knew, again from South Park, that it's all in the eyes, even with animation. The thing about South Park is their eyes are gigantic and that's what you're looking at all the time. It's funny because we've been asked to look at other animated shows that are coming out, and they'll give us a pilot. We don't even have to listen to the story. We don't have to see anything. If you see cartoon characters with little beady eyes, it's not going to work.
MATT: It doesn't suck you in. It's the big mouth and big eyes.
TREY: And so we purposely went for really big eyes on these puppets.
MATT: Also, one thing we learned is that all of the puppets are slightly cross-eyed, because if they just look straight ahead, then they'll have that sort of dead stare.
TREY: They sort of look like The Simpson's.
MATT: They're just slightly cross-eyed. When we look at each other, when you make eye contact with somebody, you actually do go slightly cross-eyed. That helps them look more lifelike.
Why make Alec Baldwin be the leader of the actors?
TREY: Why Alec Baldwin? Why any of them?
MATT: Alec Baldwin seems the most vocal of the activist liberal Hollywood crowd.
TREY: We actually wrote the movie before the Iraq war started. The idea of America being the world police is an idea well before George Bush. We wanted the movie to be about America. We didn't want it to be about the last year or last two years or about George Bush, but we wanted it to be about America and America's place in the world. And so, when we were doing another draft on the script, the Iraq war was just starting to escalate, and it was just this insane period that we can all remember where for about two months, you would turn in a news channel, like CNN, to find out what is going on and you'd get "Things are heating up in Iraq and here for commentary... is Sean Penn." And you'd get Sean Penn telling you what was going on in Iraq. And you're just like WHAT?? We had the same reaction a lot of people had, that it was ridiculous. It was funny to us, so we were like "let's put that in the movie" because it was just hysterical.
MATT: Alec Baldwin seemed to be the guy who's always upfront in that stuff. He gets the most animated and angry about it.
Any feedback from any of the actors?
MATT: Nobody except for Sean Penn. I think...I know that most of the actors that we use in the Film Actors Guild are going to think its funny, because ultimately, it is. If you guys have seen the movie, it's just absurd.
TREY: It's so stupid.
MATT: It's just fun, except for Sean Penn, who just showed himself to be so humorless that he couldn't even have fun with that.
TREY: It was funny because he seemed angry in the letter and there was not one thing that he could have done to help us anymore. One week before we come out, he sends a letter to the papers and gets us on the front page of everything.
MATT: It was on the Drudge Report for two full days.
TREY: Easily made us an extra 10 or 12 million dollars. At first, we were going to write him a letter back and get into it, and we were just like "Hey, he really did us a gigantic favor!"
MATT: We should send him flowers really.
So you haven't responded to it?
MATT: No, I mean in interviews. Now we have six days of interviews after we got the letter, so we have in every interview...by the way, that letter wasn't to us. It was an open letter. We got it a day before it was "leaked" but he sent it to the LA Times.
TREY: It was funny because all he did was take something that Matt said in Rolling Stone and take it out of context and then claim, "this is what I'm mad about" when in fact, we had heard from people who know him that he was pissed off as soon as he saw that he was in the movie.
MATT: Because he was in the teaser.
TREY: He was honestly like "How dare someone make fun of me?" And what was so funny is that in the movie what we have them do is be "I went to Iraq! I went to Iraq!" When all of us are like we don't give a rat's ass if you went to Iraq, dude. I went to the Grand Canyon once, but that doesn't make me an expert, you know. It's funny that we then get this letter and it's like "PS: And I went to Iraq! I went to Iraq!"
MATT: If you saw the movie, it's almost exactly what he said in the movie.
I thought it was a joke, a publicity ploy.
TREY: People thought we wrote it!
MATT: Our lawyer and people from Paramount called us and said "Did you guys plant that letter? Because if you did, you just can't do that" and we were like "No, we didn't. He really wrote that."
A lot of people think that you guys are making a statement about the Iraq War with the film, but that's not the focus at all.
MATT: We set out to make a Bruckheimer movie with puppets. That really was our central thing. Making that funny meant picking the more serious subject matter. Having puppets talk about like 'Oh, my date to the prom didn't show up" just isn't as funny as puppets talking about terrorism and WMD's. That's just way funnier. So it really came from wanting to tell a story from that point of view and less from "we have this political agenda and we know what's right for the world" and we're going to try to tell a story that is going to service that, which is like what Michael Moore. Which to us, really is not very honest filmmaking. The honest filmmaking is supposed to be art. Where in the process of making this movie, we were interested in the emotions behind the politics and the emotions of being American the last three years. And that's Gary's story, being confused, being proud, being ashamed, like when he says "I don't want the power. I don't want the guilt. I don't want the responsibility." I think that's what a lot of Americans feel about us being the police of the world and that has nothing to do with this election. It just has something to do with a uniquely American conundrum.
TREY: There was a two week period where we thought about putting a Bush puppet in it.
MATT: If we did Bush, we were going to do Kerry.
TREY: Yeah, and it seemed that every time we tried to write scenes for it, it seemed to immediately let the audience off the hook because immediately, the entire movie, the statements it was making, the political side, was all about Bush or all about the last six months instead of being all about America.
MATT: One thing that Trey and I liked about the film is that our own politics may be subconsciously in there, but we kept our own politics out of it. We have strong political opinions, but we're not very well educated in global foreign policies. So we decided to just leave that alone.
TREY: And we don't assume to know the answers. We think it's really complicated stuff and there is no real clear cut answer on how to deal with this. What we should be doing is what we always end up doing, laughing at the people that are extremely on this side screaming at the people on that side, which is really all we do in South Park.
MATT: It's the secret of South Park.
TREY: We just pick a topic. We have the boys, who are just boys in the middle watching two groups go to war over something and in the middle; they're just like "Hey! Guys! Stop killing each other." Because there is no clear-cut answer.
MATT: Ultimately, we tried to make the movie, and it's not in a Hallmark way or a super-saccharine way, but we tried to make the movie optimistic and pro-American. Because we basically don't think the world is as dire as either side says it is.
The music was brilliant. Who composes the music?
MATT: Trey does.
TREY: I do the songs. Of course, as soon as we had the idea, after the South Park movie, we swore we'd never do another movie again. Then the idea of a puppet movie seemed too good to not do. I wanted to make it a musical and thank God we didn't because it would have been even more impossible. But we came up with this other idea, what if we did a Bruckheimer movie with puppets? We realized that really Armageddon is so close to being a puppet movie anyway. Why not go all the way with it?
MATT: It would be great as a puppet movie!
TREY: We started watching these Bruckheimer movies and we were like "You know what? These are musicals!" Bruckheimer really does do that, instead of having these characters break out into a song, he gets Aerosmith to do a song. Almost to the minute, every twelve or thirteen minutes, there is a song. I can still make the music, but I'm going to write those kinds of songs. Hit those movie moment songs, where there's going to be the "he has to make the big decision song", which became the country song, "the love scene song", "the road back song", which is the Pearl Harbor song, obviously, the "montage song". I just wrote them like that. The Kim Jung Il song is the one that didn't quite fit within that, but it was just one that came to my head and I couldn't resist putting it in the movie.
Is Kim Jung Il the global Eric Cartman?
TREY: Yeah, I mean I think that comes across no matter what. It's funny because basically when I start screaming, I just start sounding like Cartman, which is why I can never get people to take me seriously when I'm screaming.
MATT: Yeah, we noticed that but it wasn't conscious at the beginning, but he kind of does just turn into Cartman.
TREY: We realized that if Cartman did become the dictator of a country, that's pretty much who he would get. It would be North Korea. Everyone would starve. He'd be threatening everybody with weapons. He'd be a real shithead.
South Park is a show that Comedy central uses to launch other shows, like the Chapelle Show. How does that make you guys feel and have you seen Drawn Together?
TREY: I haven't seen Drawn Together yet, but this last year on South Park was so great because the Chapelle Show is so good. That show had so many brilliant moments. It's so good, and this sounds weird, to feel actually proud to be on Comedy central. For the last year there was a solid hour of television. It helped our ratings.
MATT: It brought our show up too. We thought, okay, there's this really good show on after us. We better make our show good too.
TREY: With Kid Notorious and those kinds of shows, you always feel like you're dragging dead weight. They've launched every new show for the last eight years off the back of South Park. This last year with Dave Chapelle was so great. For us, it's not a competition thing; we'd love to have more great shows on the network. It helps us.
A lot of people I've spoken to believe that this has been one of the strongest seasons for South Park, particularly citing Passion of the Jew?
MATT: It's funny, but we actually both think that Passion of the Jew was the worst show of last season. We both think that last season was our best in terms of writing, but Passion of the Jew was the worst.
TREY: Passion of the Jew, writing wise, is not a solid show. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
MATT: The first episode of last season, the one where the boys all become ninjas and it becomes Japanese anime. We were really proud of that show.
TREY: I think that was one of my favorite shows we've done. I felt that was really an incredible show. I was proud of that show.
How do you do serious satire? Make dramatic dialogue so funny?
TREY: How do actors in Bruckheimer movies read those lines? All those lines come from that kind of thing, where you're watching it and think, how could you possibly say that with a straight face.
MATT: Just watching Pearl Harbor and laughing, it's the most brilliant comedy ever written. We got to do this. How can we elevate to this. We spent a long time figuring out what the right tone would be for this movie. We wrote a script that had a lot of jokes in it. As we started shooting, we realized that the puppets couldn't pull off comedy, because you can't get nuance out of a puppet. Then as soon as you have the puppet say the most serious line, then you were laughing. We quickly were every day re-writing the script for technical reasons, but also to take all the jokes out. Every time a puppet would say a joke, we would take it out and replace it with a serious line, and it was funnier.
TREY: Both of us have the same favorite scene in the movie, which is when Gary and Lisa are in their little ship on their way to Cairo. Its right after the first time that "America, Fuck Yeah" plays. Basically, Gary's sitting there in all this crappy make-up and the whole exchange is, "Gary, are you okay? I was thinking if I mess up a line on stage it's a bad review, if I mess up here, we're all dead." That is the single funniest line to us. She says, "I believe in you Gary, belief is all we have". Obviously, if you read that in a script, Paramount is going, "we thought this was a comedy. Where's the joke in that?" Yet when you see those puppets say those lines, to us it's the funniest scene.
MATT: It was a big lesson in scoring too. You could put a comedy score behind it (starts humming) and it would ruin it. We would put a scene together and think, wow, this doesn't look like much of anything. Then we would take the soundtrack to Armageddon and put it beneath it. All of a sudden, it totally worked. The underlying conceit, the underlying joke of the movie is what you're seeing and what they're talking about versus the score totally doesn't make sense.
Will you guys ever make a sequel to Team America?
MATT: I will never even go near a puppet again.
TREY: This was the most horrible experience.
MATT: When I have kids and take them to the park, if some guy's doing a puppet show I'm setting him on fire.
Are you guys dicks, assholes, or pussies?
TREY: I don't know, sometimes I feel like a dick.
MATT: I think we're like a lot of people. We're that thing in between them all.
TREY: The taint...we're hermaphroditic.
You mentioned that you don't want to get involved in politics. Why comment on P. Diddy and say that his voting campaign is silly?
TREY: We didn't mean it. It has nothing to do with the movie. David Wild, from Rolling Stone, just happened to be in our office at three in the morning watching us edit. I don't know why we started talking about it...
MATT: We were drunk.
TREY: We were drunk. I honestly believe it, but to encourage uninformed people to go vote, he's not doing anybody any favors. And it's not about on the left or the right, both parties do it, Democrats and Republicans, they go and recruit uninformed, unaware people, because they want to appeal to their emotional impulses and get them to vote for their side. I don't think that anyone should pat somebody on the back for a vote or die campaign.
MATT: The greatest campaign would be to go out and get informed. If you have a solid opinion, then go vote, that's American. But to tell Joe Blow, whose been snowboarding for eight years, and doesn't watch a lick of news, and doesn't know anything, then show up at an event and say vote or I'll kill you, that doesn't seem that democratic.
TREY: It wasn't us making a big foray into politics. That's just common sense. Most people agree with that. I think the parties like those campaigns, because they're the easiest people to get to vote for you cause. That's why we have candidates, especially for president, that do nothing but appeal to emotion. They don't talk about anything with any kind of substance because you have a bunch of uniformed people out there. There are all kinds of political science about having literacy or civic tests before you're able to vote. I don't know about that, and we haven't gotten that deep, it just seems common sense to us. If you don't have an opinion and you're unaware of the issues, stay home. Don't vote because the country doesn't need your vote.
MATT: Vote if you want, that's okay too, but don't have a group pressure you into voting. If you really don't know, and you think like I do, that no matter who you vote for there's going to be a giant shithead running the country, don't let some group pressure you into voting.
TREY: You shouldn't be shamed into voting.
MATT: Or threatened.
Do you watch the debates?
MATT: Yeah, we watch the debates. They're screamingly funny.
TREY: I haven't seen them. We've been so busy until the last two days.
MATT: We finished the movie last Thursday.
TREY: We were doing the Dennis Miller show last week and they had a live shot of Mount St. Helens and on the other channel the vice-presidential debate. We watched Mount St. Helens, it was so much better.
Is the project with the Avenue Q guys still happening and what is that?
TREY: We just talked about doing something with them and that was a year ago.
MATT: We keep talking on the phone and sending e-mails back and forth. It just so happened that we had this one project that we'd both wanted to do.
TREY: I went out to breakfast with the Avenue Q guys. They're asking us, "What should we do?" Like we're the sages, which is an amazing position to be in. I said "do whatever you want, do what you want to do." They were like, "we want to do a musical about the founding of the Mormon Church." That stopped me in my tracks, because literally in the first six months of meeting in college we talked about the exact same thing. We've loosely been talking about doing it sometime in the future.
MATT: We're taking a big vacation first.
TREY: Those guys have tons of stuff to do anyway.
The only criticism I've heard of your work is that you're not subtle in your satire. Team America: World Police falls under that category. Have you guys ever planned to do more subtle work?
MATT: We don't get off on subtlety. We're not subtle guys.
TREY: Subtle doesn't make us any money. We just don't understand subtlety. It's a criticism that's valid, but it's just not us.
Will you ever release a DVDA album?
TREY: It is bullshit that we have not been able to get our band together. We're too busy doing all this other stuff.
i kicked up the font size a notch. hard to see 'n all. hope u don't mind.
Quote from: ©bradi kicked up the font size a notch. hard to see 'n all. hope u don't mind.
It all depends, do you plan to run away from xixax again? :wink:
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanQuote from: HedwigThat's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)
Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).
FROM IMDB NEWS:
Matt Stone told today's (Thursday) Toronto Globe & Mail that he included Moore in his film (as a hot-dog munching suicide bomber) because he was outraged over a segment of Moore's last documentary. "I did an interview for Bowling for Columbine because I'm from Littleton [where Columbine High School is located]. He asked me to do it. ... People think we did that [South Park-type] animation that comes after us in the movie, but we didn't. It's so anti-American and mean, and I was just bummed out because people thought I did that."
Did he just use the term Anti-American?Shut the fuck up, Matt! I want to LOVE Team America now stop being silly.
Quote from: HedwigDid he just use the term Anti-American?
Shut the fuck up, Matt! I want to LOVE Team America now stop being silly.
Unfortunately I think he meant it in the way you think he meant it.
I just heard his interview on Fresh Air... I disagreed with most of what he said. He fully acknowledges the racism of the Kim Jong Il character and sees no problem with it (and equates anti-racism with trendy political correctness). He also said the point of South Park is that people will be inherently evil if society doesn't shape them (I almost vomited after that one).
You can love Team America and disagree with Matt Stone... I still do. The movie is really a collection of valuable instinctual reactions. Anytime they talk about concrete political things (Trey Parker is a self-proclaimed Libertarian, for example) they just start sounding really genuinely pretentious and clueless and far more annoying than the political celebrities they satirize in Team America.
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanHe also said the point of South Park is that people will be inherently evil if society doesn't shape them (I almost vomited after that one).
Ugh.
I think Matt Stone's interview in Bowling for Columbine was very good, and insightful, and amusing, and I liked it. It kind of worries me, though -- in terms of Moore, because, didn't the K-Mart kid speak out against Moore for a similar reason?
Fuckin' people!
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanAnd there's an excrutiatingly profound scene involving vomit.
ZOUNDS, MAN. FUCK.
i just saw the clip of that and it's the future and that's all i can say
Quote from: HedwigQuote from: Jeremy BlackmanQuote from: HedwigThat's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)
Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).
FROM IMDB NEWS:
Matt Stone told today's (Thursday) Toronto Globe & Mail that he included Moore in his film (as a hot-dog munching suicide bomber) because he was outraged over a segment of Moore's last documentary. "I did an interview for Bowling for Columbine because I'm from Littleton [where Columbine High School is located]. He asked me to do it. ... People think we did that [South Park-type] animation that comes after us in the movie, but we didn't. It's so anti-American and mean, and I was just bummed out because people thought I did that."
Did he just use the term Anti-American?
Shut the fuck up, Matt! I want to LOVE Team America now stop being silly.
The cartoon was ironic, for Christ's sakes. And it did seem like they made it. When I first saw that I definitely assumed it was them helping out. So by all means, blow the shit out of Michael Moore.
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanQuote from: HedwigDid he just use the term Anti-American?
Shut the fuck up, Matt! I want to LOVE Team America now stop being silly.
You can love Team America and disagree with Matt Stone... I still do. The movie is really a collection of valuable instinctual reactions. Anytime they talk about concrete political things (Trey Parker is a self-proclaimed Libertarian, for example) they just start sounding really genuinely pretentious and clueless and far more annoying than the political celebrities they satirize in Team America.
No idea where you get that. To me they strive not to be pretentious about it. If they're "self proclaimed" in any way, you'll be sure to hunt for it because they aren't about throwing cards on the table. Now THAT would be clueless and annoying.
Quote from: SalQuote from: HedwigQuote from: Jeremy BlackmanQuote from: HedwigThat's a stupid reason to make him the most extreme target -- but I'm sure it's hilarious anyway. (I like the ham thing!)
Oh, it's not that bad. (MINOR SPOILER) The worst they do is make him look like a fat slob who goes around like a crazy person and eats hot dogs (and I'm not sure he would disagree with that).
FROM IMDB NEWS:
Matt Stone told today's (Thursday) Toronto Globe & Mail that he included Moore in his film (as a hot-dog munching suicide bomber) because he was outraged over a segment of Moore's last documentary. "I did an interview for Bowling for Columbine because I'm from Littleton [where Columbine High School is located]. He asked me to do it. ... People think we did that [South Park-type] animation that comes after us in the movie, but we didn't. It's so anti-American and mean, and I was just bummed out because people thought I did that."
Did he just use the term Anti-American?
Shut the fuck up, Matt! I want to LOVE Team America now stop being silly.
The cartoon was ironic, for Christ's sakes. And it did seem like they made it. When I first saw that I definitely assumed it was them helping out. So by all means, blow the shit out of Michael Moore.
I agree - blow the shit out of him -- but I just have doubts that their vendetta against him is really because people thought they made that cartoon as much as it is about politics. Simply.
For example;, in that interview a few pages back Stone says, "I'm just unsure of how real that 'news' was" or something to that effect -- about F911.
So. Hm.
I just saw the new tv spot cut to that awful "I'll Stand by You" shitty-ass-soft-rock-song. Perfection!
It's official. Ebert needs to spends more "alone" time with Mrs. Ebert.
Review. (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041014/REVIEWS/40921007)
Ebert clearly did not get the joke.
Quote from: Roger EbertThe plot seems like a collision at the screenplay factory between several half-baked world-in-crisis movies.
Or maybe he's still sore at this (http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-344/epid-2440/).
Quote from: hacksparrowEbert clearly did not get the joke.
Quote from: Roger EbertThe plot seems like a collision at the screenplay factory between several half-baked world-in-crisis movies.
Isn't that the whole point of the film? I had a feeling that Ebert would give this a negative review. I'm excited about seeing this tonight.
wow.....what a fantastic movie. best of the year.
"What's the signal?" was the best part
Quote from: El Duderinowow.....what a fantastic movie. best of the year.
"What's the signal?" was the best part
That was hilarious!!
Anyway -- I was blown away by this. So fuckin aboslutely incredibly hilarious. I totally agree with JB's 'trinity of satire' comment. And that Michael Moore stuff is overblown. He's in it for a matter of seconds and they barely make fun of him. His puppet, however, is SO cute.
Alex Baldwin was the primary target. Wow.
F.A.G.s!
The puppets are great. The music, too, is actually very beautiful. And that vomit scene is one of the funniest most well -written things I've seen in a long..time. (Well-written, i.e. The dick-pussy-asshole thing)
I loved it and had a great time but I was not with my people -- I Was with people snickering in delight everytime a liberal was dissed. "Kill (insert name of liberal here)!" a character would shout and the woman next to me would mutter, "yeah, get that son of a ..."
Hmm. I agree with AO Scott about the "pronounced conservative streak amid the anarchy" since not a single conservative is mocked in this film.
That sex scene is mightily hysterical. Had me laughing out loud and when I say loud lord do I mean loud.
Quote from: HedwigF.A.G.s!
UGH. There was some guy in the theater who thought it was be funny if he screamed "FAG" everytime that word was on the screen. Of course, he also thought it was funny to scream the entire movie. :?
I don't share the same sentiment as the rest of the board on this one. The first 30 mins was very funny, followed by a boring 70 minutes with occasional flashes of brilliance.
The vomit scene that everyone mentions was far from genius, it was nearly cringe-worthy. On a more positive notes, Team America does have some great stuff (the songs, some clever jokes, etc) but this is all diluted with simple low-brow humor that in any other movie people would be criticizing.
Overall, **1/2 out of 5 stars. I didn't hate it, but I certainly didn't love it .
Quote from: ranemaka13Quote from: HedwigF.A.G.s!
UGH. There was some guy in the theater who thought it was be funny if he screamed "FAG" everytime that word was on the screen. Of course, he also thought it was funny to scream the entire movie. :?
Haha, I think we were in the same theatre, ranemaka. There was a guy like that where I saw it, too. Everytime something remotely funny happened he'd make it a point to laugh loudly and in as fake a manner as possible. I think he got sick of it, though, after about the first 45 minutes, and he finally calmed down.
First fifteen minutes of this flick made me think I'm going to see something special here, but that's just because I was taken by the brilliant craftsmanship displayed (that, and the lingering aftereffects of seeing the
Life Aquatic trailer -- oh, and the atrocious
Seed of Chucky trailer). Once I got past that, though, the flick itself was still very good. Some of the writing was just amazing (the dicks/pussies/assholes monologue will probably be the best moment of writing dialogue-wise we see all year), and some just amazingly bad (though that might have been purposeful, I thought some of it could've been fine-tuned a little bit more). The F.A.G. thing was just pathetic. Not funny "ha-ha" but funny "ugh." The puppet sex scene was the other great highlight of the movie. I've read rumors that a golden shower and pearl necklace were cut -- any credence to that?
I loved Jong Il's solo (and after the credits he sings some more which I don't think made the movie -- about how Alec Baldwin is useless or something -- pretty good stuff too). America, Fuck yeah! was a great song, too -- all the musical numbers, one of the thing these do guys thrive at, were highlights of the film. Also, some of you may remember the episodes of South Park, "Asspen" and "Child Abduction is Not Funny": from "Asspen" was taken the "you've put it in a montage" song (brilliant, hilarious, especially for filmmakers), and from CAiNF, the whole "shitty wall! Stupid Mongolians!" Asian restauranteur voice used here for Kim Jong-Il. Couldn't help but think of that every time I heard him talk, and maybe they should've considered hiring a few voice actors just to add a little more variety.
I don't think the film as a whole is brilliant or anything. Just good. It started with a bang, but it went on a bit too long, and it really shied away from some targets it should've hit while attacking targets that simply didn't deserve it. Stone's and Parker's philosophy is "shut up because you have no clue what you're talking about -- and we don't either." They take pride in that. But that's not exactly smart, and in the past, they've at least purported themselves to be smarter than that, and to have something to say, so I expected more from them. That they don't pretend to know the answers to these problems is okay, but to shy away from taking a stab at it and to make fools out of people who do is just immature and counter-productive.
I admire people who speak out with an informed opinion. Actors get a lot of flak for that because they aren't expected to be intelligent people -- but the actors portrayed in this film are on average intelligent people with well-formed opinions. They merely have the luxury of expressing those opinions and should not be berated for that. Trey Parker is a self-proclaimed Libertarian (or so I've read -- some say Stone is Libertarian, Parker is Republican, which would explain a lot), yet all the people he pokes fun at are liberals, and he doesn't mock one conservative. It seems to me this movie started out making fun of everyone, but lost sight of that goal fast. If you're looking for an "answer," for an alternative to F9/11, I guess you could look here, but you won't find as much in the way of substance. It was good for a laugh, though.
The hair on Gary's face. Has no one mentioned the hair on Gary's face?
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanThe hair on Gary's face. Has no one mentioned the hair on Gary's face?
And his 'darkened skin'.
Quote from: Jeremy BlackmanThe hair on Gary's face. Has no one mentioned the hair on Gary's face?
it's uncanny!
Quote from: ono.I admire people who speak out with an informed opinion. Actors get a lot of flak for that because they aren't expected to be intelligent people -- but the actors portrayed in this film are on average intelligent people with well-formed opinions. They merely have the luxury of expressing those opinions and should not be berated for that. Trey Parker is a self-proclaimed Libertarian (or so I've read -- some say Stone is Libertarian, Parker is Republican, which would explain a lot), yet all the people he pokes fun at are liberals, and he doesn't mock one conservative. It seems to me this movie started out making fun of everyone, but lost sight of that goal fast. If you're looking for an "answer," for an alternative to F9/11, I guess you could look here, but you won't find as much in the way of substance. It was good for a laugh, though.
i think they dont mind actors having an opinion, but appearing on news shows with that opinion as if anyone should listen to them as an authority or anyone other than 'another citizen who cares', is ridiculous. i think they have both said to be pretty down the middle guys, neither left or right leaning totally. they have said in countless interviews anyone who goes into a movie (this or any other) looking for answers is an idiot.
TA was hilarious, but I saw it more as a collection of brilliant individual moments. The mocking of 90s action thriller conventions was terrific, particularly the use of songs and the "America fuck yeah" patriotism of those films. But it was sort of lacking something. I can't pinpoint what it was.
I liked the skewering of celebrities who think their opinions are any more important than, say, mine, even if I do agree with many of them, though, as mentioned before, there weren't any conservative celebs mocked. The conservatives were mocked by the whole Team America concept, and decimating Paris and Cairo and claiming the terrorist threat was over, the red, white, and blue everywhere, etc. But if you are going to mock one side, you should mock the other one too. Neither side has a monopoly on stupid people. Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter are such easy targets!
The "montage" song was used in a South Park episode once before, so for me it didn't have the impact of the other songs, but it did fit in the film.
Quote from: themodernage02they have said in countless interviews anyone who goes into a movie (this or any other) looking for answers is an idiot.
Then they've totally missed the point, and proven their ignorance. Film can provide answers for those willing to actually use their brains instead of just settling for mindless entertainment. See:
The Thin Blue Line. This could've been both: it could've been entertainment, and that brilliant satire JB spoke of. It just fell short.
Quote from: RaviBut it was sort of lacking something. I can't pinpoint what it was.
Exactly. Though I think we (and SHAFTR) sense what it was, and we've all touched on it.
Quote from: RaviThe "montage" song was used in a South Park episode once before, so for me it didn't have the impact of the other songs, but it did fit in the film.
Yep. "Asspen" was the episode, as I mentioned before. One of their better ones, too. Great send-up of 80s films of a certain disposition.
Quote from: Roger EbertNo real point is made about the actors' activism; they exist in the movie essentially to be ridiculed for existing at all, I guess.
He has a point here. I don't recall the film mentioning or hinting at actors not being an authority on politics. They are simply written as evil villains and not much more. Thinking about the film a day later I wish it ws a little smarter in its commentary. The film succeeds in skewering action film cliches but not so much with current politics.
The guy who laughs at "F.A.G." must be touring the country, because he was in my theater as well. That or there are a lot of morons out there.
Just saw TA. It's not the greatest movie ever, but dammit if I didn't laugh quite a bit. The only thing missing to make the Bruck/Bay satire complete was the low-angle-slo-mo-360 shot.
I laughed a lot. Some of it I think was crude just for the sake of shocking the audience. But they did some creative stuff with it.
This is why I can't stand Roger Ebert. His review of Team America..
Oh, and as always - SPOILERS
***
If this dialogue is not inscribed over the doors of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, it should be. Their "Team America: World Police" is an equal opportunity offender, and waves of unease will flow over first one segment of their audience, and then another. Like a cocky teenager who's had a couple of drinks before the party, they don't have a plan for who they want to offend, only an intention to be as offensive as possible.
Their strategy extends even to their decision to use puppets for all of their characters, a choice that will not be universally applauded. Their characters, one-third lifesize, are clearly artificial, and yet there's something going on around the mouths and lips that looks halfway real, as if they were inhabited by the big faces with moving mouths from the Conan O'Brien show. There are times when the characters risk falling into the Uncanny Valley, that rift used by robot designers to describe robots that alarm us by looking too humanoid.
The plot seems like a collision at the screenplay factory between several half-baked world-in-crisis movies. Team America, a group not unlike the Thunderbirds, bases its rockets, jets and helicopters inside Mount Rushmore, which is hollow, and race off to battle terrorism wherever it is suspected. In the opening sequence, they swoop down on Paris and fire on caricatures of Middle East desperadoes, missing most of them but managing to destroy the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre.
Regrouping, the team's leader, Spottswoode (voice by Daran Norris) recruits a Broadway actor named Gary to go undercover for them. When first seen, Gary (voice by Parker) is starring in the musical "Lease," and singing "Everyone has AIDS." Ho, ho. Spottswoode tells Gary: "You're an actor with a double major in theater and world languages! Hell, you're the perfect weapon!" There's a big laugh when Gary is told that, if captured, he may want to kill himself and is supplied with a suicide device I will not reveal.
Spottswoode's plan: Terrorists are known to be planning to meet at "a bar in Cairo." The Team America helicopter will land in Cairo, and four uniformed team members will escort Gary, his face crudely altered to look "Middle Eastern," to the bar, where he will go inside and ask whazzup. As a satire on our inability to infiltrate other cultures, this will do, I suppose. It leads to an ill-advised adventure where in the name of fighting terrorism, Team America destroys the Pyramids and the Sphinx. But it turns out the real threat comes from North Korea and its leader Kim Jong Il (voice also by Parker), who plans to unleash "9/11 times 2,356." No. 1 on his list: Blowing up the Panama Canal.
Opposing Team America is the Film Actors' Guild, or F.A.G., ho, ho,
with puppets representing Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Matt Damon, Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn (who has written an angry letter to Parker and Stone about their comments, in Rolling Stone, that there is "no shame" in not voting). No real point is made about the actors' activism; they exist in the movie essentially to be ridiculed for existing at all, I guess. Hans Blix, the U.N. chief weapons inspector, also turns up, and has a fruitless encounter with the North Korean dictator. Some of the scenes are set to music, including such tunes as "Pearl Harbor Sucked and I Miss You" and "America -- F***, Yeah!"
If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I'd be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it. The White House gets a free pass, since the movie seems to think Team America makes its own policies without political direction.
I wasn't offended by the movie's content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides -- indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they're wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn't matter.
Pwaybloe already posted that on the previous page. The link, anyway. And you missed the The Wild One quote which leads into the first paragraph.
I don't get why people always bitch about a critic just because they dumped on one movie they really like. The more I think about it, the more I see some of his points, yet the more I also realize in some ways, yeah, he was off. But to hold up just one review as to why you don't like any critic, let alone Ebert, is shortsighted.
How about Fight Club? I donno about you, but most film lovers would agree it is one of their favorite films and quite possibly one of the best films of the 90s.
Here's some portions of his review.
The problem with Roger Ebert lies in the fact that he cannot review a movie which he finds distasteful. If he sees something socially wrong in his eyes or unecessarily violent, he pans it. Take a look at his review of Resevoir Dogs. He did the same thing.
Quote from: Roger Ebert"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.
Quote from: Roger Ebert"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor.
Quote from: Roger EbertNone of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists.
Quote from: Roger Ebert"Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action.
Quote from: Roger EbertAlthough sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.
Quote from: Roger EbertWhen you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering.
Quote from: Roger EbertIn many ways, it's like Fincher's movie "The Game" (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages.
Quote from: Roger EbertBut the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.
I agree with you that Ebert was way off on Fight Club (not to get off on a tangent). It was one of the best of the 90s. The Game, OTOH, was crap (which really makes Fincher a quite overrated director who one wonders why he even has a forum here -- but I digress), so I don't know why he bothers comparing the two. He liked The Game, IIRC, and that they both were made by Fincher is their only comparison. He's way off on Donnie Darko, too, and on a lot of other films. Though saying he's "off" is only saying you disagree with him, and maybe (a big maybe) that his logic is off. Which, in a lot of cases, it is. He's just the most known and regarded critic, which is why he gets the most attention, but positive and negative. And generally, if I see something "socially wrong or unnecessarily violent" in a film, unless there is a great point to it (like there is in Fight Club), I tend to take a negative opinion about it. That's what you call gratuity, and the less of that there is in films, the better.
I respect Ebert. A lot.
But his Team America review was problematic for me in that, he didn't actually talk about the film, which is what he did with Fight Club, and which is indicative of his weaknesses. He lets shit get to him and then he stops playing fair.
He didnt say a fucking thing about the movie. Whether or not it actually had merits of its own, at least in craftmanship. No, no. Instead, he takes the political route, which is not what Trey and Matt wanted people to come away with. They regard humor and laughter much higher than Ebert does. For Ebert, it's a goddamned sin in the face of such a "serious time." Bullshit. That kind of thinking is exactly what they wanted to steer away from, and exactly the reason this movie is so important right now.
Team America - 1
Ebert - 0
Ebert says stuff about Team America, all of it wrong. Like here:
QuoteIf I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I'd be baffled. It is neither for nor against the war on terrorism, just dedicated to ridiculing those who wage it and those who oppose it. The White House gets a free pass, since the movie seems to think Team America makes its own policies without political direction.
Hey, assmunch, Team America is said to be run by "corporate sponsors" several times in the film. Listen. [And that, incidentally, makes the F.A.G. further worthy of ridicule since they're basically employees of the kind of corporations large enough to sponsor such an endeavor.]
Annnnnnd here:
QuoteI wasn't offended by the movie's content so much as by its nihilism. At a time when the world is in crisis and the country faces an important election, the response of Parker, Stone and company is to sneer at both sides -- indeed, at anyone who takes the current world situation seriously. They may be right that some of us are puppets, but they're wrong that all of us are fools, and dead wrong that it doesn't matter.
It doesn't just laugh at "anyone who takes the current world situation seriously." It laughs at literally everyone. That's two different things. Also a nihilistic film would've killed off everyone, made no side "win." In this movie, Team America fucking wins. Kim Jong Il loses; the actors lose, too. If anything, Parker/Stone end up saying that as idiotic as "our" War on Terror is, it's going to have its victories and its going to keep right on going...... no matter who's in the White House.
let's analyse his review for another two pages.
Quote from: Pubricklet's analyse his review for another two pages.
Sounds like a plan. I saw this the oher night and thought that the songs were one of the huge highlights of this absurdly silly satire.
saw this today. it was occasionally hilarious, but seemed to run out of steam a little in the middle before picking back up again at the end. i kind of wish, also, the movie had made more use of the satire instead of falling back on all the 'dirty jokes'. the songs were great, a lot of it was very funny. i dont think it was as good or thought-out as the south park movie.
Quote from: MeshHey, assmunch, Team America is said to be run by "corporate sponsors" several times in the film. Listen. [And that, incidentally, makes the F.A.G. further worthy of ridicule since they're basically employees of the kind of corporations large enough to sponsor such an endeavor.
Any statement made in the film about Team America being run by "corporate sponsors" loses any bite because this claim is pretty much only made by the liberal "activist" actors as they're being ridiculed. How can we be expected to take this seriously when the film's main targets (arguably) are making the same argument? To me, it just seemed like any knocks on conservative ideology were done half-heartedly as an attempt to make things appear even. Often, these criticisms lose their bite because of how the film uses them as motivating factors for the Hollywood actors in the film. For example, I really enjoyed how Team America destroyed virtually every historical landmark within a 100 mile radius during their missions, but this statement about America's carelessness lost quite a bit of weight when the wishy-washy Hollywood morons in the film used it to start their campaign. It seemed like the filmmakers made a few statements about American conservatism and war, and then used liberal characters to devalue the statements they made by dealing with these errors foolishly. It just didn't seem evenhanded to me. I came out of the theatre thinking that the only criticism the film successfully landed on the political right was its consistent mockery of misguided patriotism and nationalism. Also, I think the fact that not one single conservative individual was mocked is a real shame, but this has already been pointed out.
Of course, all of this is OK if the entire point of this film isn't to make fun of "everybody". I suppose, technically, it does, but I don't see how it's even close to evenhanded. Plus, the movie stops being very funny after the first 30 minutes or so, when it starts getting lazy and stops being creative (with a few exceptions). This is the most important thing: the film just isn't that good and really a disapointment considering the talent of Stone and Parker. South Park is a brilliant show, but this film is just only above average.
My friend was right when he said that Parker/Stone are hit and miss. South Park is brilliant, but their movies leave something to be desired.
Quote from: UncleJoeyAlso, I think the fact that not one single conservative individual was mocked is a real shame, but this has already been pointed out.
i think conservatives have been mocked enough this year.
Quote from: UncleJoeyQuote from: MeshHey, assmunch, Team America is said to be run by "corporate sponsors" several times in the film. Listen. [And that, incidentally, makes the F.A.G. further worthy of ridicule since they're basically employees of the kind of corporations large enough to sponsor such an endeavor.
Any statement made in the film about Team America being run by "corporate sponsors" loses any bite because this claim is pretty much only made by the liberal "activist" actors as they're being ridiculed. How can we be expected to take this seriously when the film's main targets (arguably) are making the same argument?
I've read this like 4 times and I can't make any sense of it.
Quote from: themodernage02
i think conservatives have been mocked enough this year.
Conservatives can
never be mocked enough.
Quote from: MeshQuote from: UncleJoeyQuote from: MeshHey, assmunch, Team America is said to be run by "corporate sponsors" several times in the film. Listen. [And that, incidentally, makes the F.A.G. further worthy of ridicule since they're basically employees of the kind of corporations large enough to sponsor such an endeavor.
Any statement made in the film about Team America being run by "corporate sponsors" loses any bite because this claim is pretty much only made by the liberal "activist" actors as they're being ridiculed. How can we be expected to take this seriously when the film's main targets (arguably) are making the same argument?
I've read this like 4 times and I can't make any sense of it.
Fair enough. I'll try to clarify. The film attempts to make the joke that Team America is sponsored by corporations. There we have a jab at the current administration. However, the main voices for these statements are members of F.A.G. Are we supposed to take anything they say seriously? No, of course not. Everything they say is ridiculed. So, how exactly is Team America's "corporate sponsorship" actually mocked? It would be different if a voice of reason or authority was making these statements, but instead we have the characters the film spends the most energy ripping on saying it. It's like having Charles Manson speak out against child abuse (extreme example - I know). What he's saying might be right, but nobody is going to listen to him because he's such a ridiculous person. If this still doesn't make any sense, don't worry because it really isn't that important - and I'm an idiot.
As for conservatives being mocked enough this year - perhaps. But I was just hoping that the film would be a little more even. I don't think it was. Team America was used to show how dumb action movies are (for the most part). Virtually everyone else was used to show how dumb liberals are, with the occasional obligatory slap on the wrist for conservatives. Again, this is fine if the whole point of the film isn't to make fun of "everybody".
Stone Tells Undecided Voters to Stay Home
"South Park" co-creator Matt Stone has a message for all you undecided voters.
"Stay home," said Stone. "It doesn't matter who you're gonna vote for. If you really don't know who you're gonna vote for, or are uninformed, or haven't really thought about it? Just stay home."
Stone and Trey Parker have teamed up for the puppet parody "Team America: World Police," which debuted in third place at the box office this weekend with $12.3 million. A parody of 1980s action movies, the film ridicules both Democrats and Republicans.
In person, Stone has little patience for those on the political fence.
"If you really don't know or you're just going to vote for George Bush because he's already in office, or you're gonna vote for John Kerry because he's on the cover of Rolling Stone, don't do that. That's lame. Just stay home. That's all we ever said," Stone told the San Francisco Chronicle in Sunday's editions.
Quote from: MacGuffinStone Tells Undecided Voters to Stay Home
"South Park" co-creator Matt Stone has a message for all you undecided voters.
"Stay home," said Stone. "It doesn't matter who you're gonna vote for. If you really don't know who you're gonna vote for, or are uninformed, or haven't really thought about it? Just stay home."
Stone and Trey Parker have teamed up for the puppet parody "Team America: World Police," which debuted in third place at the box office this weekend with $12.3 million. A parody of 1980s action movies, the film ridicules both Democrats and Republicans.
In person, Stone has little patience for those on the political fence.
"If you really don't know or you're just going to vote for George Bush because he's already in office, or you're gonna vote for John Kerry because he's on the cover of Rolling Stone, don't do that. That's lame. Just stay home. That's all we ever said," Stone told the San Francisco Chronicle in Sunday's editions.
America tells Stone that no one cares what he says
This movie had balls.
I like balls.
South Korea Likely to Shun 'Team America'
"Team America: World Police" and its harsh parody of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il will almost certainly not be coming to South Korean theaters, but don't blame politics. Rather, the omission stems from a highly competitive film market that has increasingly seen local releases squeezing out Hollywood product.
"There are no plans to release 'Team America' at this time," said Douglas Lee, general manager of United International Pictures Korea, which handles the distribution of Paramount Pictures releases.
High-profile films such as "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," "Bringing Down the House" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" have missed out on theatrical releases in South Korea . Even the "Austin Powers" series performed poorly.
"A few years ago, these kinds of films would have been automatic releases," an American film company executive said. "American brands that think they can just stroll into town need to wake up. Not all Korean kids want to smoke Marlboros and wear Levis."
Korean films have accounted for more than 58% of the local box office sales from January-September, with Hollywood barely making up 40%. The trend toward local films is even more pronounced in the countryside, where Korean movies make up well over 60% of ticket sales.
Although South and North Korea are still technically at war, the South has pursued a more open approach to dealing with the North. However relations remain prickly. The South often bristles at what it perceives as insensitive or provocative actions taken against the North, such as when President Bush labeled the North part of an "Axis of Evil."
There's a shocker.
Quote from: MacGuffinbut don't blame politics. Rather, the omission stems from a highly competitive film market
Uh-huh. Right.
Quote from: MacGuffinNot all Korean kids want to smoke Marlboros and wear Levis."
What is this world coming to?
So... 8 pages and no mention of the 'panthers'???
I'll give the movie credit for that. Yeah, them "panthers" were terrifying, alright. They looked so lifelike, too.
America..
FUCK YEAH..
:lol:
felt like a 30 minute south park episode stretched out. and it did lose steam at some points (mainly the middle)
but
it was undeniably hysterical. i don't see why ppl are so hung up on the political crap. it works best as a spoof on bruckheimer movies. i mean, that's really all it is in my mind.
Spoilers.... what else is new...
Just saw this. I was crying so much when Gary was leaving the bar drunk.. and then the vomit. I thought I might die.
Just so I know.. what did the sex scene show for you yankees? Because apparently it was cut down to make an R rating... So what exactly did you all see?
Everything except bodily fluids, I think. They pretty much ran the gamut of positions.
I think the "U.S." version is the same as everywhere else. But either way, the version we saw basically had several positions and the puppets were humping the whole time. That was about it (not even close to NC-17 in my opinion).
I bet it was difficult to cut parts out, since the whole thing was playing with a song ("Only A Woman"), so they had to re-structure whole bits, probably.
My guess as to what could offend the MPAA is either oral sex (not shown explicitly in the final cut) and the previously mentioned "acrobatic" sex.
This movie was a satire of two things and a direct attack on one thing: It was a satire of big Bruckheimer-type action movies and the idea that America can police the world (even when that pisses everyone off). And it's a direct attack on celebrities who, Parker and Stone feel, shouldn't really act as though their thoughts are somehow more important or more informed on these matters (why should we care what celebrities think, etc.). Those are the only real targets of the movie, as I saw it.
Plus is has rockin' music that perfectly satirizes Bruckheimer movies ("... Freedom costs a buck 'o five..."), but South Park was better. But I see South Park as an untouchable pinnacle of movie magic, so it's hard to live up to that, I know.
They always referenced that they blew off Garafalo's head.. but wow, that Susan Sarandon fall was intense.
The censored scenes involved golden showers and pearl necklaces.
You are wofwess Awec Balwin!
Quote from: MyxomatosisYou are wofwess Awec Balwin!
More like "You all wolthless Arec Bardwin"
but pete can translate it better than I can.
Matt Damon!
the hammer, for God's sake.
That's it, I'm getting this one off the net.
I might not be alive when we get it over here.
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!
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.
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.
From, you guessed it, The Movie Blog:
It's the clickity-click link (http://www.themovieblog.com/archives/2004/12/matt_stone_never_to_work_with_puppets_or_trey_parker_again.html#more)
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.
he / they said the same thing after the south park movie
haha.. that's hilarious..
Quote from: ranemaka13Matt 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.
Quote from: matt35mmQuote from: ranemaka13Matt 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"?
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."
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.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedigitalbits.com%2Farticles%2Fmiscgfx%2Fcovers4%2Fteamamericauncensoreddvd.jpg&hash=e9de5760a280e4719593740ab3023ec30907b6e1)
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.
Puppet sex!
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.
Haha.. So true..
QuoteSTONE: 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.
America!! FUCK YEAH!!!
haha that was the best part really.