The song about Pearl Harbor was good, especially the line about (IIRC) needing you as bad as Ben Affleck needs acting school. The reason why the tough-guy character (I forget his name) doesn’t trust actors was also very funny. And Kim Jong-Il’s panthers.
I still am not sure what kind of political point the movie is trying to have. But I think maybe I was expecting it to be more political than it was. I first saw the trailer on the Daily Show, and I was thinking it was going to be a movie for the Daily Show demographic. As it was, like I said before, I don’t think most of the audience got the part about Hans Blix, and the funniest thing about Kim Jong-Il was the mispronounced L. So it wasn’t a Daily Show kind of audience.
They used some weird word that started with ‘val’ instead of ‘transform’. Does anyone know what that was referring to? Also, I know I’ve heard the joke about the three kinds of people in the world before, but when I Googled it I only found Team America references.
I thought it was a riot. It was pretty amazing the stuff they did with those marionettes! Some quotes that had me in stiches-
“I’m gonna drill two holes in your dick so when you piss it shoots in all different directions!”
This is such a bizarre threat that it is certain to have the other person at a loss for words.
“…freedom costs a buck-o-five…”
Who the hell feels $1.05 is an exorbitant price for freedom? Its hilarious how the song goes on and on about how much sacrifice freedom takes, but then it all boils down to some arbitrary price, almost like something you’d buy at the supermarket or something
What creeped me out was how in, say, the scene on the balcony where Gary tells Lisa about his childhood tragedy contained a lot better and more convincing acting than I’ve seen from some “real” performers (I’m not naming any names here . . .)
Yea, although I wish I would’ve saved 10 minutes and just waited for the soundtrack. Not that great of a song.
Has there been any reaction by the celebrities to this movie (besides Sean Penn’s angry letter, wherein he is supposedly mad about something else and doesn’t mention the movie)?
The “third writer” was Pam Brady, also had a writing credit on the South Park movie and has been working on the television show since its inception. According to the IMDB, she wrote the Underpants Gnomes episode, which is one of the most popular episodes of the series.
This sounds like the feeling my friend and I discussed in the parking lot after the movie yesterday.
My expectations were higher. After some flat-out brilliant episodes of South Park (good example: the kindergartners arguing about votes in the heat of the 2000 election debacle), not to mention the magnificent South Park movie, I thought they’d have more interesting things to say about the political situation than they did.
Instead, it seems like they focused their energies on creating a spot-on parody of Hollywood action movies, with the formulaic characters, by-the-book explanations of motivation, glurgy songs on the soundtrack, and so on. Kind of a big, fat, slow-moving target for such demonstrably skilled satirists, I thought, and that made the movie kind of a letdown, both for me and my friend.
Sure, there was funny stuff. The “Lease” song was a crackup. The vomiting scene was funny. The “panthers” were hilarious. Spotswood’s constantly moving chair was always worth a chuckle. And so on, and so on: every couple of minutes, there’d be a nice, solid bit. (And the cockroach thing at the end is by far the weirdest “joke” I’ve seen in a studio comedy in years.)
It just didn’t add up to very much. Paradoxically, as difficult as it must have been to actually make the movie with these hundreds of marionettes and enormous (and gorgeously detailed) miniature sets, as hard as they worked on the physical production, the actual script strikes me as being awfully lazy.
