Team America: World Police

The new movie from the South Park guys comes out in October. Did you ever see that show from the 60s The Thunderbirds? Yeah, it looks a lot like that. A puppet movie. But better. I'm not sure now where I read it, but I've heard that as it stands the movie now carries an NC-17 rating due in no small part to extremely graphic scenes of gratuitous puppet sex. Knowing Trey and Matt, it probably also has an ludicrous amount of cursing in it as well. MTV.com has a lot of exclusive material, including a few trailers, here. Here's the official site. I think Dick Cheney gets eaten by a shark at one point.

Despite its surely political content, I'm very much looking forward to this movie. Would I be looking forward to it as much if somebody else besides the South Park guys were making it? Like, say (and here I'm searching my brains for others who would actually make a movie about terrorism with puppets), Spike Jonez or somebody? No. The reason is (surprise, surprise) political. For all the profanity, sex, and violence in the South Park movie and TV shows, the underlying message is, I think, more or less conservative. Or at least anti-liberal. The message of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut was that it is ultimately a parent's responsibility to monitor what their kids see in the movies and on TV, instead of relying on the government or a piece of stupid technology (v-chip) to do it for them. South Park the TV show continually and openly mocks PC culture, and Cartman rails against hippies at every opportunity (although some of what could be construed as his more racist tendencies often see him ostracized from his friends, and rightly so).

Matt Stone once said, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.” I think he's trying to make the point that liberals have not cornered the market on morality or tolerance.