SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT
Trey Parker
and Matt Stone's outrageous, crass no-budget Comedy Central toon
South Park, the first TV series to originate from a foulmouthed
video Christmas card — the uproarious short "The Spirit
of Christmas" — outdoes itself with this MPAA-skewering
feature spinoff, a long-overdue middle finger to Jack Valenti
and his misguided minions. In Bigger, Longer & Uncut,
third-grade buddies Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny sneak into a
profane R-rated movie version of the sitcom starring their comic
heroes, Canadian fart-jokesters Terrence and Philip (the series'
recurring self-parody), and become influenced by their lewd, expletive-spouting
hijinks. Their parents, particularly Kyle's uptight Jewish mother,
Mrs. Broflovski, overreact, launch a nationwide protest against
Terrence and Philip and incite a war against Canada.
Most feature film spinoffs that were
released while the shows were still on the air reeked of lazy
filmmaking (1966's Adam West Batman flick, Munster,
Go Home, the Power Rangers movies, and story-wise,
last year's X-Files feature). Bigger, Longer & Uncut
nearly falls prey to that — Stan, Kyle and Cartman's uncensored
language, free from network-mandated bleeps for the first time
since "The Spirit of Christmas," becomes less funny
as the movie progresses. But luckily, like the best South Park
episodes — the Big Gay Al show, the episode where Mrs.
Broflovski protests TV violence, the Christmas special where the
kids befriend a cheery Charles Manson — Bigger, Longer
& Uncut is sharp adult satire, with more on its mind than
exhausting South Park's sometimes-exhausted joke about
cute-looking cartoon characters with the mouths of sailors.
The film, which has Parker and Stone
reprising their writing, directing and character-voicing duties
from the show, is a delightfully savage and astute comment on
parents and hypocritical conservative groups (like the MPAA, which
debated with the Colorado-based comics over some of their gags)
who blame society's ills on entertainment. In fact, that's not
all Bigger, Longer & Uncut skewers. The most inspired
bits involve Hype Williams-directed rap videos, inane, socially
conscious all-star variety shows, the U.S. Army's treatment of
black soldiers and the racial stereotyping in The
Phantom Menace. In
one scene, the U.S. government rounds up all Canadians in internment
camps, a gag about the idiocy of the World War II Japanese American
concentration camps. Parker and Stone redeem themselves after
the lame Asian caricatures in Orgazmo.
No one will watch a Disney musical the
same way again after seeing Bigger, Longer & Uncut's
intentionally tacky musical numbers, which point out the ridiculousness
of the show tunes in recent Disney cartoons and their Don Bluth
or DreamWorks-produced imitations. These often expletive-filled
tunes, including a large-scale version of Cartman's signature
tune, "Kyle's Mom is a Big Fat Bitch," mark the return
of composer Marc Shaiman, who displayed a welcome sense of humor
earlier in his career (remember his City Slickers and Addams
Family scores?) but has been slumming lately, with some of
the schmaltziest scores this side of Michael Gore (My Giant, Bogus).
Critics have complained about South
Park's crude construction-paper cutout animation, but it's
one of the charms of the series and movie because it parodies
chintzy-looking religious cartoons like Art Clokey's old clay-animated
series Davey & Goliath and that '70s show about that
annoying, big-eyed white bouncing ball with legs. The fact that
there's a reference to something as obscure as that shows a lot
of thought has been put into this franchise (although The Simpsons,
which it's often compared to, is a smarter and much more
consistent show). South Park has lately experienced a backlash
because of uneven scripts, declining ratings and Parker and Stone's
own lousy track record on film (Orgazmo, the box-office
poison of BASEketball). The series, rejuvenated on the
big screen by this surprisingly clever and incisive spinoff, should
get viewers to finally "respect its authori-tah."
© 1999 Jim Aquino