Like a Rollin' Stone

Nobody could ever accuse South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone of being parsimonious or selective when it comes to spewing bile or, indeed, other bodily fluids.

Team America; World Police, the duo’s latest big-screen marionette epic sees the War On Terror dramatised in ’80s high-concept grandiloquence, as the movie’s latex imperialist heroes take on Kim Jong-Il’s worldwide terrorist network. But North Korea’s Dear Leader is not alone. In addition to the Chechens and the rest of the planet’s evil rag-head populace, Kim has hookwinked Alec Baldwin, The Greatest Actor In The World, along with the rest of Hollywood’s socialist elite, into aiding and abetting his nefarious anti-democratic schemes.
In the blizzard of gay jokes, Arab jokes, Asian jokes, blow-job jokes and vomit jokes that follow, can the eponymous team police save the freedom loving world as we know it? We can only hope.
Predictably, not everyone is impressed with Messrs Parker and Stone’s scatological approach to geopolitics. Sean Penn, depicted here being torn apart by panthers, as he battles in true knee-jerk fashion to protect the North Korean tyrant, has expressed dismay over Team America, saying “It’s all well to joke. Not so well to encourage irresponsibility.”
“Yeah, that’s been keeping me awake at night” says Matt. “I think people have a hard time conceiving that anything counter-cultural could be anti-leftwing, and a lot of movies are about expectation. So, I guess people from the left were always going to be shocked and people from the right pleasantly surprised, but I knew when Sean Penn wrote that a couple of weeks after the movie came out that we must be doing something right.”
Although Mr. Stone appeared in Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine – the anarchic animator is himself a Columbine High School alumni – even the porcine polemicist wasn’t immune from Team America’s savage scattershot.
“I only appeared in Bowling For Columbine because I come from Littelton, Colorado, myself. But we were pissed off, especially Trey, because in Bowling For Columbine it follows my piece with a really bad rip-off of South Park and it fucking sucks that everybody thinks it was ours. But that’s my high-brow reason, really I was just happy to show him blowing up Mount Rushmore”.
Of course, those decent folks from the American Right are even more indignant about the film. During a recent two minutes of hate, The White House, in a shock development, denounced Team America as unpatriotic. And yet, despite this official fist-waving, by pissing just about everybody off, Parker and Stone’s puppet epic has won admirers on both sides of the culture divide. While ostensibly pandering to the most strident kind of America bashers, the spectacle of Susan Sarandon’s grisly comedy death has earned approving sniggers from many cheerleading patriotic types making Team America, as J. Hoberman noted in The Village Voice, the perfect date movie for “A drunken frat boy out to impress right-wing skank Anne Coulter.” Was that Matt’s primary objective, I wonder, healing his polarised nation?
“Oh yeah, that was the whole point” laughs Matt, “Y’know we never had a real political agenda, it just would have been a crime not to take the piss out of the left and the right, because they’re both holier than thou. If you get me drunk enough I could sit here and talk politics with you, but really we’re stupid guys who don’t know any more than the average joe.”

Team America: World Police is released January 14th. Part two of this interview will appear on hotpress.com in the coming weeks