Country:USA
Recognizable Voices:
Trey Parker
Matt Stone
Directed By:
Trey Parker
I have a weak spot for Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They are the proof that you can be crass, vulgar, stupid and outrageous, but still be a vital asset to society as artists. In many ways, they are the conceptual opposite of Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag. They have a method to their madness, an educational project masquerading as a product. Team America: World Police might just be the summit of the mountain they have been climbing with South Park all these years. An extremely iconoclast and satirical movie that captures the scope of America under the Bush administration. It's hard to believe this gem is almost seven years old. I have watched it more than twenty times already and last Friday, Josie and I decided to give it a run to see how well it resisted the test of time and dust. It passed with flying colors.
Team America: World Police tells the story of Gary Johnston, a broadway actor. But he's not like every Broadway actor you know, he is the absolute BEST. That's why he's recruited by Spottswoode for Team America, as their new spy. But Gary struggles with the idea that his acting can chance the world, let alone save it. He has painful memories related to the power of his skills. But when terrorists start taking the globe hostage with a scatter shooting of attack, Gary hears the calling (oh yeah, and he also fell in love with that babe Lisa, as first sight. Memorable love scene in between them). He will step up to the plate for his love, for his new friends and for his country. For them, he will face Kim Jong-Il, Alec Baldwin and his deepest fears, in a discombobulating showdown that the minds of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay could have never even imagined.
Despite the explosions, the gruesome killings and the WMDs, the message of Team America: World Police is deliciously altruistic. Psychosis, idiocy and anger have no borders. We are all suceptible of being the bad guys, no matter how much people look up to us. It's up to ourselves to keep ourselves and the people we know from becoming what we hate the most. In the commentary tracks Parker and Stone admitted that the goal of their movie was to mock the Jerry-Bruckheimer-school-of-making-movies. And they did, from a technical and a philosophical standpoint. The use of puppets instead of characters has an obvious funny, slapstick value, but it's also a statement against the stereotyping cast of big budget action movies. Half of Team America: World Police's puns are about Hollywood and the involvement of mainstream media into politics.
Parker and Stone get "it". They understood how capitalism works and their place in the giant wheel of consumerism. If they can't stop it with ideologies, intellectual formulas and seriousness, they got that they can pedal backwards, offer their audience a bit of critical thinking and a way to make up their own mind. Team America: World Police is a movie of it's time, I guess you can even say it captured the zeitgeist of an era corrupted by demented capitalism. For that, it will go down in history, the same way noir movies did in the fifties and war movies did in the eighties. I think it's the very pinnacle of the Parker/Stone duo career and one of the best damn satire movies there is. Of course, kids in twenty years might be confused while watching this, but anybody born, or interested into this era will understand the overflow of (not so) subtle innuendo of the Bush years. Store it in your collection or if you didn't see it yet, run to the video store.
SCORE: 95%
Team America: World Police tells the story of Gary Johnston, a broadway actor. But he's not like every Broadway actor you know, he is the absolute BEST. That's why he's recruited by Spottswoode for Team America, as their new spy. But Gary struggles with the idea that his acting can chance the world, let alone save it. He has painful memories related to the power of his skills. But when terrorists start taking the globe hostage with a scatter shooting of attack, Gary hears the calling (oh yeah, and he also fell in love with that babe Lisa, as first sight. Memorable love scene in between them). He will step up to the plate for his love, for his new friends and for his country. For them, he will face Kim Jong-Il, Alec Baldwin and his deepest fears, in a discombobulating showdown that the minds of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay could have never even imagined.
Despite the explosions, the gruesome killings and the WMDs, the message of Team America: World Police is deliciously altruistic. Psychosis, idiocy and anger have no borders. We are all suceptible of being the bad guys, no matter how much people look up to us. It's up to ourselves to keep ourselves and the people we know from becoming what we hate the most. In the commentary tracks Parker and Stone admitted that the goal of their movie was to mock the Jerry-Bruckheimer-school-of-making-movies. And they did, from a technical and a philosophical standpoint. The use of puppets instead of characters has an obvious funny, slapstick value, but it's also a statement against the stereotyping cast of big budget action movies. Half of Team America: World Police's puns are about Hollywood and the involvement of mainstream media into politics.
Parker and Stone get "it". They understood how capitalism works and their place in the giant wheel of consumerism. If they can't stop it with ideologies, intellectual formulas and seriousness, they got that they can pedal backwards, offer their audience a bit of critical thinking and a way to make up their own mind. Team America: World Police is a movie of it's time, I guess you can even say it captured the zeitgeist of an era corrupted by demented capitalism. For that, it will go down in history, the same way noir movies did in the fifties and war movies did in the eighties. I think it's the very pinnacle of the Parker/Stone duo career and one of the best damn satire movies there is. Of course, kids in twenty years might be confused while watching this, but anybody born, or interested into this era will understand the overflow of (not so) subtle innuendo of the Bush years. Store it in your collection or if you didn't see it yet, run to the video store.
SCORE: 95%
