To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment July 2, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/07/02/southpark_uncut "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" Beneath the veneer of fake dicks and fart jokes, it's really a righteous paean to saying whatever the hell you want. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Stephanie Zacharek "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" is a movie about freedom of speech and of expression, about courage in the face of oppression. But that's just a lure to get you into the theater -- these days it's hell to attract an intelligent audience into a movie rife with fart jokes, fake dicks and bad language. So, for the record: "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" is ultimately so enriching, it could change your life, and will no doubt become a staple of civics classes for years to come. Now about those fake dicks: They're real! But not really -- they're photographic images cut out of paper. You see them when Saddam Hussein, who's died and become Satan's lover in hell, starts waving them around from under the bed-clothes, threatening poor Beelzebub with all kinds of untold pleasures of Eros. Let your freak flag fly, we say. But not even those fake dicks penetrate to the core appeal of the "South Park" movie, a collaboration between Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the hugely popular Comedy Central show. (If a distinction must be made, the fart jokes are even funnier.) "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," is a surprisingly cohesive piece of filmmaking -- really. It's never a good idea to hold out much hope that a half-hour animated program will translate well to the big screen: The herky-jerky, minimalist animation of "Beavis and Butt-head" (entertaining enough in 30-minute wedges spliced with video footage) proved too slack to sustain a feature-length movie. Beavis and Butt-head are characters designed to be watched from a slumped-down position in a chair at home, the kind of thing you use to numb yourself out after a day of punching cash-register (or computer) keys -- or the kind of thing you watch if, God forbid, you find yourself wasted in the middle of the afternoon. But "Bigger, Longer & Uncut" -- even more so than the show from which it was developed -- demands attentiveness. Maybe it's more correct to say that it commands it. If you're feeling distracted and fuzzy, a song like "Uncle Fucka" (one of several big musical numbers in "Bigger, Longer & Uncut") is just the thing to snap you back into the world of the living, whether you find the hedonistic abandon of the lyrics ("You're an uncle fucka, yes it's true, no one fucks uncles quite like you") offensive or not. The protests of educators and learned dweebs to the contrary, "South Park" -- both the show and the movie -- isn't slacker entertainment, the kind of anti-stimulation you seek when you want to close yourself off from the world. It requires a certain level of engagement to key into "South Park's" miniature universe of anarchy. At its most basic level, it's about the freedom and exhilaration of saying whatever you want. People who've programmed themselves to forget how lush and naughty it felt to say, "Fuck!" for the first time obviously wouldn't get it. In "Bigger, Longer & Uncut," the outrageousness of the things that come out of the "South Park" characters' mouths is amusing for the first half-hour or so. But Parker and Stone must have known they couldn't rely on it for the duration, and they marshaled enough ideas to build the movie out from there, spinning out a spiral of devious, dizzying little thrills. Written by Parker, Stone and Pam Brady, the story, for all its outlandishness, is worked out better than the narratives of many allegedly "serious" live-action features. Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny all sneak into the R-rated Canadian import film "Asses of Fire," starring their heroes, toilet-humor potentates Terrence and Philip. (Refused entry because they're too young, they ask a homeless person to buy their tickets for them -- a reflection of Parker and Stone's adamance about keeping the movie's R-rating, thus forcing parents everywhere to take their kids to see it. It's a loud-and-clear raspberry to the Uncle Fuckas on the MPAA ratings board.) When they return to their third-grade class with an arsenal of delightful new obscenities, their classmates rush off to see the movie for themselves. Parents, shocked at their progeny's new vocabulary, call a meeting and decide that it's not society nor television that's to blame, but Canada. At the initiation of Kyle's mom (who, as anyone who's ever watched the show knows, is a big fat bitch), and with the help of Conan O'Brien, Terrence and Philip are taken hostage by the United States. Canada retaliates in a most heinous fashion -- I refuse to give away the nature of the initial attack -- and a full-scale war is launched, with Satan and Saddam Hussein mixing it up as well. From there, "Bigger, Longer & Uncut" serves up nonstop action (as well as nonstop bad taste), along with some animated blood and gore. I'd be lying if I said it didn't get all just a bit wearying in the last third: You may start to feel so overstimulated that you long for a break. But Parker and Stone have a knack for subtleties, too, and it's what saves their work from being completely exhausting. They're sharp ironists, but you have to be wide-awake, open to the images that flash past the corner of your eye, like the sign on the wall of a classroom that says, "Get high on pottery." The dorkiness of well-meaning adults knows no bounds. And although the "primitive" animation of South Park is supposedly a joke, it's really a secret weapon. The simplicity of Parker and Stone's technique is what makes it so effective. On the big screen, the texture of the construction paper that's used to make the characters and backgrounds jumps right out at you, even more so than on the TV screen. Anyone familiar with the show knows that each of the regular characters has his or her own distinguishing characteristics (Kenny's snorkel hood, for example). But here, Parker and Stone also give us a beautifully drawn lobster-red Satan. His pectorals are stylized curlicues, and he wears a raggedy fur loincloth and a skull codpiece, as well as an almost perpetually stricken expression (he isn't such a bad Satan after all). And Parker and Stone are madly inventive when it comes to details: During the big opening number (in which Stan sings a paean to his small mountain town, even as he's getting pushed off the sidewalk and similarly abused by his fellow inhabitants), at one point you see a battalion of tiny black kittens marching up a snowbank. It's the kind of image to which the only proper response is "What the ...?" It means nothing in the grand scheme, but it's a small delight, a fillip that couldn't have just plopped down accidentally. Of course, none of this adequately conveys the important message of "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," but for that kind of enlightenment, you'll have to experience the movie firsthand. Suffice to say that Parker and Stone have a dream: They envision a nation populated by miniature sailors on perpetual shore leave. The reality of that dream is a long way off, but "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" brings us one step closer. salon.com | July 2, 1999