..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

This week: a give-and-take with Matt Stone and Trey Parker about Team America: World Police, a couple of notes on Tarnation, and a heavily burdened DVD new arrivals table.

Wanna buy some wood?

Puppets save the world.

How's that different from any Jerry Bruckheimer movie? It's very different and almost the same in Team America: World Police, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's brilliantly mindless, wickedly profane, relentlessly acerbic satiric alliance of Bruckheimer's worldview and the scary marionettes from Gerry Anderson's 1960s British TV series, Thunderbirds. When we spoke the day after the movie's national sneak preview, they still had not seen the assembled film from start to finish, and had only a week or so before starting the next season of South Park, which they claimed not to have the first idea for.

The primary idea in their headlong production is to encapsulate contemporary gung-ho attitudes in a puppet-populated Jerry Bruckheimer picture. "To parody a Bruckheimer movie, you have to make a Bruckheimer movie," co-writer-producer Stone says. (The explosions on the one-third scale sets are less Armageddon than boy-glory M-80-style detonations.) After North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il plots to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorists around the world (after feeding weapons inspector Hans Blix to the fishes), he plots a peace conference to be sponsored by the Film Actors Guild-note the cheap acronym--comprised of liberal actors like Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins and Janeane Garafolo. It's the same sort of gesture as when actors like Steve Buscemi, known for independent movies, are cast in a Bruckheimer movie, or when Ron Howard's Ransom cast Lili Taylor as a wicked little baby-snatching wench.

Elite anti-terrorist squad Team America recruits Gary, a Broadway actor, to join their midst and save the world. (Plus a "Michael Moore" marionette, packed with ham, straps on dynamite and suicide-bombs Mt. Rushmore.)

The pair have been working on the movie for over two years. "We were just sitting around watching TV," Parker says. "And Thunderbirds was on. 'God, this could be really funny, think about it. Just do this, but we'll make it fucking filthy, let's do South Park does Thunderbirds, people will love it, right?' We called our agents, we're like, 'We know we swore we'd never do another movie again, but we've got a great idea.' They're like, 'Sorry, guys, somebody's already doing it.' For about a day, we're super bummed out. The next day, we find out they're doing live-action."

"That's the most confounding decision ever made by a studio, ever in the history of Hollywood," Stone says. "Take the puppets out of Thunderbirds. You've got fucking nothing. Such a total studio decision."

Parker says Paramount was worried about just about every savage jab in their script, but Team America is about more than the almost-NC-17 puppet sex scene and the puke scene to top all puke scenes. These guys are serious about story. "We went back and forth from parodying Bruckheimer moments to more of a 'Hero's Journey'-George Lucas-Matrix kind of movie," Stone says, in a refrain he's shared with many journalists. "But a Bruckheimer hero isn't like a Luke Skywalker hero because he knows from the beginning he's awesome and then has a moment where he falters and then in the end, he's awesome. Whereas the Frodo or Luke or Neo, they don't believe they're the one, and finally, they're the one. That gave us so much fucking grief. The scenes were way funnier with the Bruckheimer-ness."

Stone and Parker invoke another archetypes in reference to an offering made by noble Gary to his superior, who demands a certain delicate favor. "That's right out of Bruckheimer," Stone says. "You have to get back on the plane, you have to get back on the force."

"It's standard Joseph Campbell stuff, too," Parker adds of the unlikely sexual sacrifice. "Right before the third act, you've gotta go through the eye of the needle and prove that you're willing to commit to the third act. That's what it's all about. So we're like, let's do it with a blowjob."

Within the movie's Bruckheimer template, Parker is quick to dismiss any queasiness that might come from shots of "Susan Sarandon" thrown off a balcony and splattering on the ground (five "blood"-filled condoms inside the marionette) or "Janeane Garafolo"'s head exploding in a geyser of blood and viscera from a shot to the head. Within the plot, it makes sense, but in the real world? "That's the point. It doesn't matter, they were going to kill Team America and Kim Jong Il was going to blow up the world. That's the plot. That's the end."

Even with visible strings on the hundreds of marionettes onscreen, the movie's a devilish display of eye candy. Kim Jong Il's lair is neatly detailed like one of production designer David Rockwell's restaurant or hotel interiors (Nobu, the original W Hotel), an Albert Speer-meets-Andy Warhol look. When the terrorists detonate the Panama Canal, it's in a glade where all the vegetation is pot and the fronts of palm trees outside the Film Actors Guild are made from shredded dollar bills. If you look away from the puppet rutting in the sex scene, a Philippe Starck juicer passes for a lamp in the background. The costumes by Karen Patch (The Royal Tenenbaums) are especially inventive, considering that, like everything else in the movie, they had to be designed from scratch

But it still came down to eighteen-hour days, seven days a week for Parker and Stone, who are seat-on-the-pants on all their projects. "The hardest part about the movie," Stone says, was "trying to stay spontaneous and be funny in the midst of just total tedium."

"Going into it, people were nervous, they knew our style is to get to set and change everything. On South Park, on Tuesday, we change the entire show before it goes on the air [Wednesdays]. Here, they go, 'This has to be all storyboarded and figured out.' We tried, but we got to set and come to find out you can't do that. Every day we would get to set, we'd find the puppets can't do what's in the storyboard, and they're like, 'Oh yeah, fuck, what do we do?' And I'm like, "Okay, all you just fuckin' back off, we're gonna do what we do, which is just sort of guerilla-style figure out how to get something on film."

Stone says, "We changed lines last Tuesday. We were changing whole storylines, the scene where Kim Jong Il meets the Chechnyan terrorists for the first time? All that's new. We'd turn the sound off like Mystery Science Theater and try up to come up lines that fit the mouths and tell the story."

"[Producer] Scott Rudin says we rewrite more than anybody he knows. We rewrite well into postproduction," Parker says. "With the South Park movie, we got up to draft forty-three and with this one, I'm just tidying up and putting in the last changes we made on the stage because I finally want to hand a final script to Rudin and it's draft forty-four."

The six-month production, Parker says, is "the worst sixth months of my life. On average, eighteen hour days, seven days a week, not one day off except for the Fourth of July, and all just left-brain, problem-solving, less creativity and just how the fuck do we do this? Super-stressful."

But their collaborators, like Rockwell, Patch and the puppeteer Chiodo brothers all say they loved it. "They're crazy," Stone says.

"Yeah," Parker says, "People keep saying, "This is the most fun I've ever had!" and we're like, 'Are you fucking high?'"

Eight years of South Park taught them how to maximize their minimalism. "We told the guys making the puppets, we were like, 'Look, nothing else matters,' they were like, 'We can get the cheeks to move,' and we were, 'No, none of that matters, all that matters is we have total control over the mouth and the eyebrows can do all different kinds of things.'" Parker says.

"It proved to be true on this, too. A puppet would be talking, we'd have the eyebrow servo [motor] down and a puppet would be talking and we would do this thing, where we would very slowly raise that servo up while he's talking, and it makes him look like he's really thinking, and he's feeling. It was pretty cool."

"We were always riding this line between wanting to stay endearing and charming and wooden and clumsy and yet we knew we needed more emotion than Thunderbirds," Stone adds. "The problem with Thunderbirds was that you never got any big emotion out of it, you eventually lose interest."

Losing interest has been the case with some reviewers of Team America, notably Roger Ebert's one-star review, wherein he asserts, "If I were asked to extract a political position from the movie, I'd be baffled…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."

Another serious situation: In an interview published in Rolling Stone, Stone's quoted as saying of self-promotion master P. Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign, "I think just saying 'Vote or Die' is a serious danger to democracy,"

Stone rolls his eyes. "The controversy about a quote, that we think this 'Vote or Die' thing is civically irresponsible. Encouraging uninformed people to vote? We weren't taking a position of either end of the political spectrum, if you don't really know what you're talking about, don't really feel strongly, just stay home and don't vote. It doesn't help us any. That's all we said."

Parker adds, "Everyone should have the right to vote, but it doesn't necessarily mean everyone should."

They're amused by the open letter Sean Penn released the day before the movie's opening. "There's nothing he could have done to help us more!" Parker says, laughing. "Right now, we're on the front page of everything again because Sean Penn wrote a letter. We're like, 'Thanks!' Seriously, it's great." So they didn't seek permission from any of the film's slaughtered "actors"? "No, we knew from doing 'South Park,' it's obvious parody," Parker says with a shrug.

And they got away with another dig at the MPAA, which sent the film through multiple revisions in order not to receive an NC-17 for its marionette sex (rather than the splattery violence). The notoriously humorless ratings board's reason for the "R" is priceless: "GRAPHIC, CRUDE & SEXUAL HUMOR, VIOLENT IMAGES & STRONG LANGUAGE; ALL INVOLVING PUPPETS." "That was part of the deal," Stone says, "We got them to say that. I think it's great."

It's almost like a Monty Python moment, that ratings card. "They're the gods of comedy and everything else falls short," Stone says without a second's hesitation.

Tarnation

You've seen a lot of movies, I've seen a lot of movies, but you have never seen a movie like Tarnation. It's a movie I have a hard time figuring out how to write about it; description can't diminish its verve and velocity, but it's such a fresh, vibrant work from second-to-second, I almost want to just say: go, wouldja? Wrenching work, utterly original, raw and bloody with love, Jonathan Caouette's personal documentary is a major debut and an emotional submersion. At its Sundance debut, I had to repeatedly wipe tears away at the power of its portrait of a difficult life and a love even more difficult: for his mentally ill mother even at her worst moments. From the age of 11, the thirtysomething Caouette kept video diaries of his inner life, and he compiles them out of 160 hours of material-on a reported editing budget of under $300, using iMovie software-along with snapshots, answering machine messages, a dramatic reenactment, Super 8 home movies and an almost symphonic use of pop music. There's powerful us of on-screen language, as well as on-camera confession by the gay filmmaker of his early gender explorations, passing for a cute Goth girl, getting into clubs at a tender age and having an accidental experience with angel dust which left him with his own lifelong emotional disassociation. Simply, Tarnation is great; groundbreaking in many ways, but also, a terrible, lovely torrent of emotion, a world of hurt in which confession is the only the first step.

Remote Possibilities

Tons of DVDs in the second half of October, and not all of them are political. George Butler's Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (***) came out last week, as did Criterion's reissue of Robert Altman's little-seen Secret Honor (*** ½), with another nice Altman commentary and background footage of the career of Richard Nixon for those too young to remember his doggish mug. Kino's issued an almost-complete pre-In the Mood for Love Wong Kar-wai Collection, including As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild (1991), Fallen Angels (1995), Chungking Express (1996), and Happy Together (1997). (The cryptic martial arts epic, Ashes of Time, is unaccounted for.)

From France, Philippe Muyl's Butterfly (***) is small and sweet, and Nicolas Philibert's doc on a year in the life of the students at a one-room school, To Be and To Have (****), is a marvel. Also: Olivier Assayas' fascinating, self-destructing narrative, Demonlover, plus two more Criterions: George Franju's powdery horror, Eyes Without a Face (****), including his even more troubling Le Sang des betes (Blood of Beasts), a lyrical 1949 documentary short about Parisian abattoirs; and Catherine Breillat's astringent Fat Girl (*** ½), with one of her most brutal conclusions.

Plus: John Walter's likable, quirky documentary on the life of collagist, mail artist, eccentric and suicide Ray Johnson, How to Draw a Bunny (***), including a gallery of Johnson's Work, and Hou Hsiao-hsien's Millennium Mambo (****). A 2000 entry, it seems like ancient history and still completely present tense. Before getting to see it on screen again a couple months ago, I watched the opening sequence-shot of this visual dazzler dozens of times on a Hong Kong VCD from Toronto's Chinatown. While the movie's narcotic rhythms and repetitions and sudden bursts of beauty, in composition, music, gesture and perspective, are gratifying throughout, the opening is what stays. The entire movie is there: a voiceover from a character we do not ever see situates the story we are about to witness at the turn of the century while we watch, in ever-so-slowed motion, impossibly pillow-lipped model/actress Qu Shi running along a pedestrian walkway, practically skipping, aware of the Steadicamming camera behind her, turning her head, flinging her hair, smiling slightly at our witness as we are told the story took place long, long ago, yet we are in this fleeting moment, this present of youthful feminine beauty while the movie's low-key techno theme begins to pulse. She does skip, down stairs at the end of the shot, the camera staying at its higher perspective, and the instant she is about to leave the frame? A cut to black and the simmering apparition of the main title in English. A lifetime packed into one shot of a woman in her youth, smiling, smoking, laughing, skipping, disappearing.

October 8, 2004

- Email Ray Pride