Team America- World Police

[Baron Hurlothrumbo IIX 0]

New film

From the creators of South Park (and Baseketball and Cannibal the Musical)

Looks very funny.

[Milkman 1]

I saw this on Militaryphotos.net

Looks awsome!

[Doc. Zaius 0]

Looks hilarious.

Looking better than the Thunderbirds movie, but I guess that's not saying much.

[DracoPaladore 0]

Puppets remind me of Thunderbirds

Looks pretty funny.

[billybob2002 0]

No reason for creating a new topic but it looks like Team America is going to be a liberal "bash-fest" with other stuff that is not bashing the liberal folk. Also, when you look at South Park, you notice that liberals are not in good light...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005552

Quote[/b] ]

Not all Republicans share this sensibility. Matt Drudge reported on Aug. 1 that Bush advisers were in a kerfuffle over the "Team America" trailer. "I really do not think terrorism is funny, and I would suggest Paramount give respect to those fighting and sacrificing to keep America safe," an anonymous senior Bush adviser said, according to Mr. Drudge. To which Mr. Parker responded that "Bush is not even in the film" and "I would ask that people wait and see it before passing a judgment."

Later, South Park Studios posted a response on its Web site: "For some strange reason, the Bush Administration doesn't want to be viewed as 'World Police' so close to the election year." Who knows why the term "world police" would even be construed as negative, considering this is supposed to the job of the United Nations, but they've dropped the ball more times than the Dream Team in Athens. Thou doth protest too much, O mysterious Bush adviser--unless, of course, your real intent is to drum up enough controversy to plant more butts in the theater seats.

Quote[/b] ]

Andrew Breitbart, who wrote "Hollywood Interrupted" with Mr. Ebner, put it this way: "Stone and Parker make a point not to state what they stand for. They are best at expressing what they are against, and nanny-state liberalism and her slavelike Hollywood acolytes are clearly at the top of their comedy attack list. It's so Barbra Streisand of Republicans to get out of sorts that they, too, are being mocked. Stone and Parker are the rare breed that skewers everyone in power, and young people are rightfully drawn to this irreverence. Republicans better stop worrying about them--and fast."

The online Ain't It Cool News toured the sets during production of the movie, and reported that in the film there is "an organization of Hollywood liberals who are determined to stop Team America from interfering in the affairs of international politics." So the celebs are the bad guys? "Actually, they're not bad," Mr. Parker was quoted as saying. "They're just really, really stupid and misguided." According to a recent New York Times article, the Sean Penn puppet, fighting alongside Kim Jong Il with Danny Glover, screams "Die, conservative!" as he blows away a Team America member.

Looks like I got to see this movie...

[FSPilot 0]

Looks hilarious. I wouldn't be surprised if it was very one-sided as most south park episodes tend to be.

When I first saw it, though, I thought they were being sarcastic. "Team America - World Police", sounds like somebody poking fun at America's foreign policy if you ask me.

[hellfish6 7]

The South Park guys are pretty notorious for making fun of everyone... should be good.

[Homefry 0]

Looks good...

[Harnu 0]

They've been airing these commercials for a few weeks now. Looks like it's gonna be pretty funny.

[Balschoiw 0]

Didn´t those guys go to Columbine high also ?

[SpongeBob 0]

[billybob2002 0]

Quote[/b] ]Didn´t those guys go to Columbine high also ?

I only think Matt Stone attended Columbine....

LOL at Moore

[BoweryBaker 0]

I think that the title is a pun on American policy for sure. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. I agree with movies like this, its fun and funny but also has a political message behind it. This movie is going to be a classic, because it records a moment in time. This will be the movie we all look back on that describes our time and the period we lived in and will always be remembered along with it for involving itself in this content.

[Tamme 0]

I gotta see this one

[Balschoiw 0]

If Mr. "A missile a day keeps my headache away" should still be in office when they are taking it to the cinemas I´m sure we will hear some more "why do you hate america so much" - shit again...

I will definately watch it !

Creators of south park are true americans imo. They have not handed in their brains when they went to the election.

[Gollum1 0]

When I first saw it, though, I thought they were being sarcastic. "Team America - World Police", sounds like somebody poking fun at America's foreign policy if you ask me.

And mocking liberals excludes that possibility?

[billybob2002 0]

Quote[/b] ]If Mr. "A missile a day keeps my headache away" should still be in office when they are taking it to the cinemas I´m sure we will hear some more "why do you hate america so much" - shit again...

It is coming out in Oct....

Quote[/b] ]Who knows why the term "world police" would even be construed as negative, considering this is supposed to the job of the United Nations, but they've dropped the ball more times than the Dream Team in Athens.

Quote[/b] ] Republicans better stop worrying about them--and fast."

[BoweryBaker 0]

If it makes any political figure uneasy to take a look at what the nation thinks of how they're doing things then they should really start analyzing themself and perhaps making some bold positive changes without fear of being labeled a flip flopper.

[EiZei 0]

IIRC the makers of south park have described themselves as libertarians who despise both democrats and republicans.

[FSPilot 0]

Either way, it'll be hilarious.

[SpongeBob 0]

Preview interview with Matt Stone & Trey Parker:

Quote[/b] ]<span style='font-size:15pt;line-height:100%'>Pulling Strings, Pushing Buttons</span>

>> South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone lampoon the global war on terror with the hilarious Team America: World Police

 

by MATTHEW HAYS

The Toronto Film Festival was a fitting place for Trey Parker and Matt Stone to sit down to pump up their latest project, Team America: World Police.

Fitting, because the event has become entirely celebrity soaked, and Parker and Stone have made a career of trashing and mocking the excesses of American celebrity culture. But the all-puppet movie - which takes on the politics of the war in Iraq and Michael Moore, among many others - wasn't even part of the official proceedings: the perils of puppet moviemaking had proven so challenging that, as of four weeks ago, Parker and Stone's film wasn't even complete. As such, the two were crashing the Toronto party, showing off bits and pieces of their movie rather than a completed feature.

But what they did have to show was more than tantalizing: in private rooms in a swank downtown hotel, a 20 minute reel was screened. Probably by no mere coincidence, the nuttiness unravelled on Sept. 11, the three-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

And the reel was as utterly hilarious as the conceptual description would lead you to believe. In Team America, Parker and Stone imagine a world not so far away from our own: when the U.S. faces a growing terrorist threat in the guise of rogues gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, they enlist Team America, a patriotic five-person posse of agents hell-bent on destroying anything that gets in the way of their war on terror.

But don't look to Team America for a sure footing in the war on terror: these agents are bunglers who can't quite hit the broad side of a barn, destroying the Eiffel Tower in a clumsy attempt to take out a weapons-of-mass-destruction-toting Arab terrorist (in a moment that is surely meant to be shorthand for the entire war in Iraq). As in South Park, the fictional characters Parker and Stone have dreamt up interact with real-life political leaders and celebrities, including North Korea's Kim Jong-il and weapons inspector Hans Blix.

But Team America's crucial and winning central conceit is a stroke of comic genius: Parker and Stone's war on terror is being fought by a cast of Thunderbirds-style puppets. Add a healthy dose of studio action-movie stupidity - a dart aimed squarely at the bombastic idiosyncrasies of Jerry Bruckheimer movies - and plenty of running political commentary, and you've got a Parker-Stone special with, as the old adage goes, something to offend everyone.

Retro inspiration

Parker and Stone say they were hit with the inspiration while channel-surfing together over two years ago. They came across an episode of Thunderbirds, Gerry Anderson's '60s cult oddity in which a team of puppets ("filmed in Supermarionation!") navigated their way through the world of international espionage.

"We were sitting there going, ‘I remember this show,'" recalls Parker, pulling his feet up onto the couch he's sitting on. "We were saying, ‘Good lord, this is awful!' It's too bad the scripts were so bad because the puppets are really cool. Then we decided we were going to do a Bruckheimer movie with puppets. The plan was to do a disaster movie, like Armageddon or The Day After Tomorrow, which we read the script for and thought was the perfect puppet movie."

"We were going to do a global-warming episode of South Park," furthers Stone. "And we thought, ‘Can you imagine The Day After Tomorrow with puppets? What a perfect movie!' It had to be the worst script of all time."

The two then contacted their agents with the idea of making a Thunderbirds movie when they received the bad news: a Thunderbirds feature was already in the works, albeit this time the puppets would be replaced with human actors (now there's a concept!). "When we heard they were making it without puppets, we were like, ‘What??'" says Parker. "Just because the stories were so good? We decided to do the puppets, but fighting terrorism."

The movie looks like tons of fun. There are loads of the expected sight gags, martial arts fight sequences (puppet strings in full view), ludicrous musical numbers (Kim Jong-il belts out a solo) and the most explicit big-screen puppet-on-puppet sex scene since Bride of Chucky. But Parker and Stone confirm the actual making of the film has been laborious and exhausting.

"The producers said yes to this right away," says Parker, adding that nothing in their original script was yanked by Paramount execs. "And they thought this would be super-duper cheap because it's a puppet movie. But it was so hard making this movie! Doing things with puppets is way harder than you'd think. We could only get seven or eight shots done a day, if we were lucky. We had three units running at once. There was an incredible attention to detail, each 22-inch puppet had to be outfitted specifically for the film."

"We're taking some time off after this, for sure," says Stone. "We've been at Team America and South Park for eight months solid."

True to form, Parker and Stone's script is a tribute to inanity, and they pursue a take-no-prisoners approach to comedy. The film begins as Team America seeks to recruit a new member, someone who would be able to go undercover in the Middle East and infiltrate Islamic extremist terrorists. They go to the first place that springs to mind: Broadway, where they yank the young and good-looking Gary from his leading role in a musical to help them fight the bad guys. And while there are no gay puppets per se ("After Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, we were sick of gay," says Stone), Stone and Parker call the legion of anti-war bleeding-heart actors the Film Actors Guild, rendering its acronym FAG.

Offend one, offend all

While Team America can be read as a skewering of brazen Bush idiocy, the inclusion of FAG means liberal actors also come under fire (there are puppets of Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore). But it's impossible not to think of politics as the puppets play war. The movie is coming out, after all, on Oct. 15, just over two weeks before the U.S. presidential election takes place. But don't look for anti-Bush bromides in the style of Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11) or John Sayles (Silver City). Parker and Stone admit to watching the news, but do not consider themselves foreign-policy experts - and they insist they hope to offend everyone equally.

Team America, naturally, evoked responses long before anyone had even seen it. The American right was the first to rise to the bait, with a White House advisor telling Matt Drudge that he was horrified Parker and Stone would make comic fodder out of the sacred war on terror. "We're not surprised the attacks came from the right first," says Parker. "They're good at that."

Parker and Stone attempt to convey the notion that they're non-partisan comic writers, taking no prisoners and respecting no institution or person. When pressed, though, they concede they're not so wild about Bush's handling of international affairs. Isn't it a fair read of their work that they are Democrats and not Republicans?

"That's a good read," Parker responds, reluctantly. "We don't like Bush, but that's not what the movie is," adds Stone. The two had toyed with the idea of including puppets of Bush and Kerry, but pulled back after a brief tryout. "Including a Bush puppet brought it to this very literal level," explains Stone. "It made it more like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Which is fine, those can be funny, but we don't actually even think of this as political, but rather a good story." Parker interrupts: "We'd like to think that our movie is a lot bigger than Bush and this election. As much as this is about the war on terror, the concept of America as the world police has been around a lot longer."

"The movie itself, and South Park too, ridicules celebrities who talk about things they don't really know about, and something we do in the movie is ridicule activist actors," says Stone. "That's why we're intentionally not injecting our own opinions into the interviews or the movie because to do so would be hypocritical. Why does who we vote for have anything to do with this movie?"

Because, I venture, as Americans you have responsibility as your country has launched a war that has killed over 10,000 Iraqis, as well as over 1,000 Americans.

"But we're filmmakers," counters Stone. I press on: as such, it could be argued, you have an even bigger responsibility because of your influence.

"At the end of the day, our job is to make people laugh," responds Parker. "That's what people pay us to do, and that's what we're good at."

Adds Stone: "The idea behind the movie is what it's like to get into the emotions of what it's like to be an American over the past three years. Actually the whole idea of the world police has been around for a long, long time, long before Bush. It is what Americans have to deal with, and Canadians don't. There is no Team Canada, except in hockey. We [the filmmakers] have our own ideas, for sure, and if we have a few beers we go off on them.

"But this film is about the uniquely American conundrum: the world hates us, and then when we don't show up and save the day, they hate us even more. Unfortunately, it's both a curse and a blessing. But the humour always comes first, then the politics. In fact, we'll change our political point of view if that makes the story better."

"We're making fun of everyone," concludes Parker. "We're making fun of action movies, the idea of a world police, Republicans, Democrats, and the terrorists themselves. Everyone looks pretty silly. And everyone's a puppet, so it's fitting."

Team America: World Police opens Friday, Oct. 15

<span style='font-size:15pt;line-height:100%'>Big fat turd</span>

>> Parker and Stone on Michael Moore

Some may be surprised by the hostility with which anti-Bush crusading filmmaker Michael Moore is treated in Team America. Moore gets the puppet treatment in the film, which means he's also getting the voodoo doll treatment (inclusion in the movie means a guaranteed skewering).

"I did an interview for Bowling for Columbine," says Stone, "because I grew up there. And from that interview, he cut to an animated sequence done in our style. He made it look like we did it."

Fans of the feature-length documentary meditation on gun control will be surprised to learn that the animated interlude, which analyzed the history of race and firearms in America, South Park style, was not, in fact, made by Parker and Stone. "It made me furious," says Parker. "What he said in that animated piece was very offensive to me. I didn't agree with it at all."

"We had nothing to do with it," says Stone. "I know he made it look that way. That's what Michael Moore does: he creates meaning out of editing, but many times that meaning isn't true. Everyone assumes that thing was done by us. Moore is a master of montage editing."

But the two insist that, despite their anger at the way they were used in Bowling, the puppet version of Moore's inclusion in Team America is not part of a vendetta. "We weren't really getting back at him," says Stone. "He just seemed the perfect embodiment of what it was we were trying to make fun of. He's a lot of fun to make fun of."

Parker smiles mischievously: "He's a big fat turd!"

» Matthew Hays

[ozanzac 0]

Brilliant.

I hope this film ruffles some feathers......The bigger the negative reaction from the big wigs, the bigger the grin on my face when it arrives down here.  

[DarkLight 0]

When I first saw it, though, I thought they were being sarcastic.  "Team America - World Police", sounds like somebody poking fun at America's foreign policy if you ask me.

Basically that's the whole point of the movie if you ask meee

Oh well

i don't mind

i hope a lot of ppl get pissed off

i know i won't

[billybob2002 0]

A review...

WARNING EVIL LANGUAGE!!!!!!

http://www.geocities.com/fidelio1st/film.htm

Quote[/b] ]October 10, 2004

America, Puppet Sex, and the F.A.G.: Fuck Yeah!

By J. D. Taylor

Any film that contains a theme song that shrieks out “America, fuck yeah!†and also has the Kill Bill "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" theme music is a winner in my book. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park, have really pulled out all the stops with their new film Team America: World Police.

They take on politics, the F.A.G (Film Actors Guild), and provide an explicit understanding of how puppet sex works. I haven’t laughed this hard and this continuously since, well, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and the three times I saw There’s Something About Mary in the theater.

The opening of the film finds terrorists in Paris with W.M.D.’s, or what the President liked to repeat so much during the 2nd debate Friday night, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.†Team America, like The Thunderbirds, fly into action to stop the terrorists. While saving the people, they blow up the Eiffel Tower and other French landmarks.

The gung-ho over-the-top action sequences are a spoof of producer Jerry Bruckheimer-like Hollywood action films. This is even apparent during the opening credit sequence with the huge credits and the earth exploding at the end. To further their hatred of Bruckheimer and his favorite director, Michael Bay, there’s even a song about how much Pearl Harbor sucks.

In the time of Fahrenheit 9/11 and a very divided nation, Team America is a very pro-USA, pro-conservative film. Don’t think it’s a mistake that Team America blows up most of Paris in the opening. I mean hey, France did refuse to join the great U.S. of A.

However Parker and Stone do criticize the conservatives by admitting that they are dicks, their opponents pussies, and the terrorists assholes—how the dicks are always trying to fuck the pussies; and how sometimes the dicks want to fuck the assholes as well. But their point is, no matter what, all the assholes can do is shit all over the dicks and pussies.

If you’re a little lost, don’t worry. When you see the film, the message will become clear, the metaphor will be apparent. Trey Park and Matt Stone are going after everyone this time out, except for the obvious. There is no George Bush or John Kerry in this film.

There is however puppet parodies of Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Samuel L. Jackson, Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, Michael Moore, United Nations weapons inspector Dr. Hans Blix, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and a bunch of fucking asshole terrorists.

S.A.G., the Screen Actors Guild, is conveniently renamed F.A.G., or the Film Actors Guild. The Broadway play RENT is spoofed—now called LEASE, actor Gary Johnson sings about how everyone has AIDS over and over again. And this wouldn’t be a great comedy without a couple references to Star Wars—the bar scene from Return of the Jedi and Gary entering Kim Jong Il’s hideout using the Jedi mind control trick.

When Team America recruits Gary to help infiltrate the terrorists, I noticed Gary has a curious resemblance to Tom Cruise. Parker and Stone even throw in a couple hints, mentioning both “Maverick†and “Top Gun†at different points.

The puppets as a venue for political satire, instead of say the animation of South Park, works great because of the limitations of the puppets, it just adds to the ridiculousness and makes it more funny. When a member of Team America goes face-to-face with a terrorist in hand-to-hand combat, the puppets basically bump into each other, and not much else. Lisa tries to point to one of the puppet's hearts, but can't quite reach it, because of her strings.

After seeing the very gratuitous, explicit puppet sex scene that has Gary and Lisa in about every position imaginable, I am deeply offended and outraged. Oh no wait, my bad, I meant I have to commend Parker and Stone, or whoever came up with the idea to break the story that the MPAA made them cut puppet sex. I really can’t imagine what was cut, and I truly believe it was a publicity stunt to get free press for the film. And after blowing up Michael Moore in their film, it’s nice to see them use his tactics for publicity.

Team America: World Police has all the cutting edge wit, sarcasm, and social commentary of the latest South Park episodes, which keep on getting better. It’s not surprising that Parker and Stone have not only made the gut-busting funniest film of the year, but have also made one with the deepest message: One way or another, everyone is full of shit.

Alternative Recommendations: South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; Cannibal! The Musical (with DVD commentary turned on); There’s Something About Mary; Fahrenheit 9/11; Die Hard

[blackdog~ 0]

Didn´t those guys go to Columbine high also ?

what would that have to do with anything?