StinkyLulu's Favoritest Movies of the Year PSA #1: Team America-World Police

Team America: World Police stands out for StinkyLulu as one of those brilliant movies that nobody liked, 'cept perhaps StinkyLu & MisterStinky. First, the gimmick of the film (a parody of bigass pompous blockbuster flicks -- using puppets) was brilliant. Second, the execution of the parody was stunning (see the opening shoot-em up OR the puppet sex etude). Third, like the work of some of StinkyLulu's favorite filmmakers (ie. Tim Burton or John Waters) a film that no one but Trey Parker & Matt Stone could or would have made.

Most of the criticism StinkyLu's encountered regarding this film seems to say one of two things (sometimes both). "In all of their political jabs, taking the piss out of everyone, it's not clear what they are saying politically. And isn't their juvenile humor regarding homos/women/bodily functions/violence a bit self-indulgent by this time anyway?" OR-- "It stopped being funny after a while. There weren't enough jokes to keep the movie going."

Well. StinkyLulu sorta agrees with all that BUT, rather than diminishing StinkyLu's appreciation of the film, all that instead fortifies it. Indeed, StinkyLulu's of the mind that Team America: World Police is the most singularly interesting political movie of the year, in a year CROWDED with political treatises at the googaplex. The film seems most essentially about the bloated romantic fantasy formulas in which an individual "makes a difference" amidst scary political times (notions constantly resuscitated in bigass hollywood movies & by bigass hollywood moviepeople). What's so smart about this film then is that it takes this hollywood lesson & then applies the formula to early 21st century global politics...with results that are neither ideologically coherent nor simply funny.

For StinkyLulu, Team America: World Police stands out as a kind of whacked-out allegory for the limits of the entertainment-industrial-complex in providing answers to the obdurate complexities of the United States' position in a post-Soviet & post-9/11 world. Not as much as rallying point for true believers of either the Farenheit 9/11 or The Passion of the Christ variety, to be sure. But those movies aren't on the list of StinkyLulu's most favoritest movies of 2004. Team America: World Police is.