Just saw Team America (1 Viewer)

[Jose Martinez]

The sex scene alone was worth the price of admission!

 

[Luis Esp]

The movie was ok, with a few chuckles here and there. After a while I found the film to be coasting on the novelty of lampooning previous big action films, but I must say that I did find that the puppets had a far superior range of acting than most non-wood "actors" in today's movies (cough..Ben Affleck...cough).



Some of the actors to lampoon that Stone and Parker made didn't really make sense. Liv Tyler and Matt Damon (although the puppet was dead on) really don't come to mind when you think of the whole SAG.



I hope for their next film they'll take on the music business or better yet Broadway!

 

[Jose Martinez]

I wonder why harry Knowles hasn't posted a review on his website? (Or did I miss it?) Was he too offended by the bashing his "celebrity" friends, especially Michael Moore, got in the movie? Or did he actually love the movie but withheld his review as to not offend his "celebrity" friends, like Michael Moore?

 

[Michael Douglas]

I agree with one review that said the movie didn't lampoon the celebrities enough, since there's just so much more you could do with them.



I'm surprised they left out Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Dreyfuss and Leonardo DiCaprio. Anyone know wha kind of political causes Liv Tyler spoke out on?

 

[Michael Douglas]

quote:Some of the actors to lampoon that Stone and Parker made didn't really make sense. Liv Tyler and Matt Damon (although the puppet was dead on) really don't come to mind when you think of the whole SAG.

It's not an SAG thing -- it's about actors who speak up on political issues and who are all gung ho about telling the public that they're liberals and voting Democrat is the only way to go. Not sure when Tyler spoke up on politics though, but Damon has been vocal about Kerry.

 

[Nigel McN]

quote:I wonder why harry Knowles hasn't posted a review on his website? (Or did I miss it?) Was he too offended by the bashing his "celebrity" friends, especially Michael Moore, got in the movie? Or did he actually love the movie but withheld his review as to not offend his "celebrity" friends, like Michael Moore?

Nice Jose, guess you didn't look very hard, considering AICN has been all over Team America and Moriarty pretty much had the first review of it.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

quote:IMO, this film failed on pretty much every level. It was sloppy, dull, self derivative, unimaginitive, lazy and worst of all, unfunny!

Pretty much my thoughts exactly. Or I guess, more specifically, it was so less-than-it-could-have-been funny. There is so much material here prime for serious satire that I think they really just missed the mark completely.



In fact- the only satire elements I found funny were more based in being a film nerd than political or social satire (The action movie cliches, specifically the montage montage and the Team America Base, were fun for me as a movie fan).





But so much of it was just awkward. The scene between Kim Jong Il and Hans Blix reminded me of a very similar scene I once staged in a camcorder monster movie (stop motion) I made with some friends... when you have 16 year olds ad libbing dialog it tends to sound almost identical: awkward profanity and stammering.

 

[Robert Anthony]

oh, okay, where were all you people back when I was being roasted over a spit for saying similar things?

 

[Jose Martinez]

quote:Nice Jose, guess you didn't look very hard, considering AICN has been all over Team America and Moriarty pretty much had the first review of it.

Nigel, can you place a link to a Harry Knowles review? Not a Moriarty review or any other reviewer on AICN. Thanks.

 

[Nigel McN]

Harry is barely even part of the site at the moment, it is essentially run by Quint with a dash of Mori.

 

[Ernest Rister]

I'd rather clean my septic tank with tongue than read anything written on AICN. Knowles admitted to the Austin American Statesman that he wrote several fake "spy reports" for God and Monsters in order to pimp that movie. He said he considered it "creative" film criticism. Knowles changed his story three times in the infamous "Oscar" fiasco of some years back, when he posted information hacked from a private citizen's computer. moriarty accused Roger ebert of being on the take from Disney because Ebert did not review Pearl Harbor -- it turned out that Mr. Ebert was in France covering the Cannes Film Festival. Knowles even wrote a review for one of Moriarty's scripts, claiming he had discovered it, in an attempt to build buzz around it.



How many times do you people have to be lied to, how many examples of unprefessional / unethical behaviour do you need to see before you walk away from that site?

 

[Scott Weinberg]

Someone find me an APPLAUSE smilie for the post right above this one.

 

[Paul McElligott]

quote:How many times do you people have to be lied to, how many examples of unprefessional / unethical behaviour do you need to see before you walk away from that site?

I didn't need it. Boredom drove me away long before moral outrage set it.

 

[Seth Paxton]

Now get me the applause smilie for Paul's post.

Isn't amazing how unethical people are often untalented as well?

 

[Ernest Rister]

I'm still finding myself chuckling over scenes from this movie. The first line spoken in the limousine, for example.



"Now, Gary -- suck my _____!"





And the lyrics to the Team America Theme...



"AMERICA!

@#$% Yeah!

Comin' arund to save the mother@#$%%@# day, yeah!

AMERICA!

@#$% Yeah!

Lick my ___ and suck on my ____s!"



SONG OF THE YEAR.



Let's see that one performed on the Oscars.

 

[Robert Anthony]

Well, knowing Oscar, they'll nominate "I'm so Ronery" instead and have someone like Jack Black sing it.



They gypped South Park: Instead of nominating "Uncle Fucka" as they should have, they nominated "Blame Canada" and had Robin Williams sing it. And then they gave the statue to some song I don't even remember.



Actually "freedom isn't free" might get nominated, which would be a good 2nd choice.

 

[Nick Sievers]

quote:And then they gave the statue to some song I don't even remember.

By memory it was a Phil Collins song from Tarzan because they took the piss out of him a few times in the next season of South Park.

 

[Seth Paxton]

Yeah, they even talk about that being the reason for the episode in the mini-commentary.



I wonder if they pissed off enough H'wood people to keep any of their songs from getting nominated.

 

[Jefferson Morris]

They had me the moment the Earth exploded.

Anyone who saw George Clooney (whom I love as an actor, BTW) sit on Charlie Rose a couple of years back and tell the audience with absolute authority that there was no[/i] connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and terrorism ... should understand that this film needed to be made.

I'm not taking a position on whether Mr. Clooney was right or wrong. But really, how on Earth would a Hollywood actor know such a thing?

I'll stop with the politics before I get in trouble. Short version - great movie. And despite all of its abject silliness (Hammer as suicide implement?), an important movie.

WillG wrote:

quote:But, if you do lean right, your beliefs do get hammered in the entertainment industry to a disproportionate degree

To quote the movie, "Fuck yeah." I may never work up the courage to see a documentary ever again.

--Jefferson Morris

 

[Robert Anthony]

quote:how on Earth would a Hollywood actor know such a thing?

It's not like they're sequestered in a bubble or anything, or that their major brain functions are robbed from them the instant they collect their SAG card. He probably knew the same way a LOT of people knew--they took the time to read the newswires and research it. It's not like that information was top secret White House Briefing or anything--it WAS out there. You just had to dig past the first few pages of the paper to get to it.

Hell, take a look around the internet and see the amazing number of people very highly educated on the political workings and foreign policy issues of our time. Why aren't people saying "How on earth could this Grocery Bagger know such a thing?" or "How on earth does this veterinarian know such a thing?" or "how do these cartoonists know such a thing," or "how does this crazy film fan who posts on home video messageboards know such a thing?" We don't ask those things, we just assume they did the same thing a lot of us did--we read the paper, we checked the news wires, we watched the news programs. It doesn't even cross our mind to denigrate them based on their profession.

There's this really weird idea that people in the entertainment industry are mentally impaired, apparently. Sure, it's easy to assume they're all self-absorbed, selfish, and uneducated as to anything that isn't front page in Variety, (and that's a perception all too many stars and starlets are willing to contribute to gleefully, of course) but that's not necessarily a reality. It treats the people we give an exorbitant amount of money to as not much more than trained pets, expected to do the tricks we tell them to do, and not much else. It's sort of weird, actually, that simply because George Clooney is an actor, we're trained to expect him to be a drooling idiot if he's not regurgitating the most recently read screenplay.