The American Spectator

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It's the bizarre, perverse, relentlessly offensive Team America, the marionette-starring action-film parody from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

It is, of course, defensible for a critic to dislike a movie that is gleeful in its use of foul language and ethnic and sexist stereotypes, that gushes past the Monty Python and Exorcist records for on-screen vomiting, and that breaks appalling new ground in depicting sexual acrobatics involving disturbingly life-like puppets.

But that's not what has Ebert and Co. in a snit.

I SAW IT THE FILM last week. I thought its first half was a brutal satire of an America whose self-satisfied, self-centered foreign policy led it to blithely destroy other countries in the name of saving them. My take on the second half -- in which Parker and Stone depict naïve, nitwit Hollywood lefties teaming with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il for a "peace summit" meant to hide his evil schemes -- was that it was a brutal satire of those who reflexively see America as the prime villain in international affairs. Many critics, including those who write for Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Associated Press, saw the same themes as I did. Most liked Team as much as I did.

So what did Ebert say about Team in his mostly scathing review? "I wasn't offended by the movie's content so much as by its nihilism." In other words, since it didn't conform to his politics, it's nihilistic.

What did Edelstein say in his often-scathing review? The subhead captures his view perfectly: "The puppets of 'Team America' skewer the right. If only they'd stopped there." Skewering the left? We can't have that!

What did LaSalle say in his entirely scathing review? "There's nothing honestly observed" in the whole movie, which "misrepresents" Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. It's not "honest," you see, to take stands that aren't in sync with San Francisco and Manhattan.

Could LaSalle make it any plainer that he identifies with Baldwin, Penn and Robbins, and admires them for their fevered hatred of George Bush's America?

For that matter, could any of these three make it plainer that the only political satire they want made is satire that reflects a smug contempt for the right?

Next summer, according to a recent announcement in Daily Variety, Moore will be back with his next film -- Sicko, a "documentary" about the problems of the American health-care system sure to offer such bombshells as the fact that the H in HMO stands for Halliburton and that Pfizer is actually a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee.

One can already imagine Roeper's logorrhea in celebrating Sicko's "revelations," LaSalle's tribute to Moore's continued growth as a "political thinker," Ebert's admiration for the "cautious" way Moore proves that the average American would live to 130 if it weren't for corporate greed, etc.

It's hard to conceive of the fact that Ebert was once routinely compared to Pauline Kael for his lucid prose style and his championing of obscure films and lowbrow "guilty pleasures."

No more. The pundit he often resembles nowadays is another P.K.: Paul Krugman.

Two thumbs down -- way, way, waaaaay down -- on that sad development. One Krugman is plenty.

topics:
Satire, Hollywood, Movies, Iraq, North Korea