-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Carl Remick Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 5:17 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] Golden age of satire?
[Excerpts from the NY Times and Washington Post reviews of Team America: World Police.]
Moral Guidance From Class Clowns By A. O. SCOTT
Let me be the last to observe that we are currently living in a golden age of satire.... [But] maybe I expected too much ... [from] "Team America: World Police," the naughty new puppet action-musical from the resourceful and confrontational minds of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. ...
They expend most of their spoofy energy sending up action-movie conventions and over-the-top patriotic bluster, reserving their real satiric venom for self-righteous Hollywood liberals (with special attention to Alec Baldwin).
It seems likely ... that their emphases and omissions reflect a particular point of view. "South Park," with its class-clown libertarianism and proudly
juvenile disdain for authority, has always been hard to place ideologically,
but a number of commentators have discerned a pronounced conservative streak
amid the anarchy, a hypothesis that "Team America" to some extent confirms. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and other left-leaning movie stars are eviscerated (quite literally - also decapitated, set on fire and eaten by house cats), while right-wing media figures escape derision altogether. The fact that Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone appeared in "Bowling for Columbine" does not grant immunity to Michael Moore, who is portrayed as an overeating suicide bomber.
... "Team America" is sometimes more satisfying as a straight-ahead blow 'em
up than as a satire. Goofy as they are, the members of "Team America" are treated, in the end, with affection, even respect, which is part of the film's political gist. When Team America blows things up in other countries,
they do it by accident, in the course of their sloppy but zealous fight against the people who want to do it on purpose. This is not a trivial moral
distinction, and it is one the film hangs onto in impressive earnest.
The obscene patriotic ditty that is the Team America theme song might be hyperbolic (and impossible to stop singing), but it is not sarcastic. Nor is
a speech, delivered twice in the course of the action, most powerfully at the climactic moment, that is meant as an answer both to the Hollywood peaceniks and to the wishy-washy world community, whose representatives have
gathered in North Korea for a peace conference....
<http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/movies/15TEAM.html?oref=login&8dpc>
Puppet Government: 'South Park' Creators' Left Jab at Jingoism May Backfire By Hank Stuever
... Stunned by all the fun, I am almost moved to salute Parker and Stone for
their nuanced and careful takedown of American jingoism and the seemingly disastrous foreign policy that Team America stands for.
Only that isn't quite how it played to an audience on Tuesday night, at one of those free-ticket radio station giveaway previews in a packed cineplex in
Northwest Washington. The biggest laughs came when "Team America" assaulted any and all concepts of ethnicity, or when the joke was on gays, Michael Moore or a vast left-wing idiocy.
The movie feels like an elaborate inside joke on the very Americans laughing
hardest at its easiest gags, oblivious to the sly, allegorical digs at a USA
brand of bravado. What I took as a lampoon of Bushworld seemed to be received, in the seats around me, as a triumph of Bushworld. Pollsters and campaign workers, take note: "Team America" will only further confound your election-year data.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34313-2004Oct15.html>
Carl
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