B | American commandoes recruit an actor to thwart the ultimate terrorist plot. Directed by Trey Parker Starring Trey Parker and Matt Stone Review by Jon Kissel |
Spoofs take off on movie trends, while satire pokes fun at the real world. Trey Parker and Matt Stone hilariously combine the two with Team America: World Police, a film that uses the bombastic bravado of Michael Bay action films to skewer multiple varieties of American arrogance in the post-9/11 era. There was a period in my life when this was about as funny as a comedy could possibly be. Self-serious puppets on a film production that isn’t interested in maintaining any kind of cinematic illusion made every scene a riot, but now, when Parker’s and Stone’s status as the ultimate Gen X nihilists has gotten tiresome and a certain kind of shitposter has poisoned their brand, Team America has lost some of its luster. It’s still hilarious as a spoof, but its satire equates being a blowhard with invading and destroying countries. Parker and Stone would discount that as saying this is a puppet movie, the hiding spot of every 4chan asshole making Pepe memes about crematoria.
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Joel and Ethan Coen were no strangers to comedy in 1998. The highly versatile directors had already made one crime comedy and another screwball comedy, while peppering jokes and absurdities into films as varied as a gangster epic or a cerebral film about writing. What ties all their films together is a fatalism and a resistance to self-importance, and that constant thematic refrain means that they always find ways to cut characters down who think too much of themselves. It makes them incapable of producing a wholly dramatic film, but it does allow for the possibility of a straight comedy. With The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers put aside all their impulses towards seriousness and flex their comedic skills to make one of the funniest movies that’s ever existed. They’ve arguably been the greatest working directors in five different decades, but this is perhaps where all their best characters and lines come from. As well-rounded as Fargo is, there aren’t annual festivals celebrating it. The Big Lebowski is a symphonic masterpiece of timing and imagery that demands consideration as one of the all-time great films while simultaneously scoffing at that kind of praise. Respect must be paid to the best boner joke ever constructed, but all this fuss over a boner joke?
As movie studios become increasingly reliant on franchises and legacy properties, they’ve come to the semi-pathetic conclusion that if one franchise is working, why not smoosh several together? Warner Brothers has done this to commercial success with Ready Player One and Space Jam 2, though the former is Steven Spielberg’s worst movie by a wide margin and I’m never going to watch the latter. Monopolist behemoth Disney has dipped a toe in these waters with a subplot in Ralph Breaks the Internet, and dives all the way in with Chip N Dale: Rescue Rangers, a film that imagines all the Disney animated characters existing alongside live-action actors and going through the same struggles of auditions and fan convention merch tables. The best any of these mish-mashes can hope for is having talented people muddle their way through and salvage whatever laughs they can find, and that’s generally the case here. Roping in two thirds of the Lonely Island goes a long way towards tolerability for what is otherwise a stockholder presentation of a company’s vast asset portfolio.
Wes Anderson meets Downfall in Jojo Rabbit, a film that, to its credit, I’m still turning over long after I’ve seen it. Something rankles in Taika Waititi’s self-described anti-hate satire about a young German boy who can’t make himself into the perfect Nazi soldier he aspires to be. The balls required to make a film about a member of the Hitler Youth who has Hitler himself as an imaginary friend are considerable, but they shrivel up when confronted with a tone that can’t decide on stakes or jokes and in turn undercuts both. Armando Ianucci provided Waititi the way forward with his miraculous comedy The Death of Stalin, but Soviet war crimes have a harder time translating to the Third Reich.
I volunteer as a screener for the Atlanta Film Festival, and while I’m happy to do it, it does mean watching a lot of bad movies. Bad has a wide spectrum, ranging from incompetently made to unoriginal or indulgent. That last one is the most irritating, as it speaks to a fundamental mismatch between the filmmaker’s perception of themselves and the fact that they’re paying an organization to let them show their movie to other people. Some part of me admires the chutzpah on an indulgent festival applicant, even if their film is not up to snuff. This leads us to The Watermelon Woman, a film that instantly evoked the mental effort required to watch a bad screener and try to come up with something positive to say about it. Cheryl Dunye’s debut indie is politically ahead of its time, as representation has been all the rage in film circles for at least the last decade, but that’s not worth much when it’s simultaneously struggling to piece a coherent scene together. |
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