I'm So Ronery
I just got back from seeing Team America: World Police with Jonah, Ben, Collin and Dave.
The movie is absolutely hilarious, even though it's awfully reactionary. It opens with our heroes, Team America, bedecked in garish clothes and horrible red, white and blue vehicles, chasing down a Bin Laden lookalike in Paris. By the time they are done, the Eiffel Tower has fallen onto the Arc de Triomphe, and they've called in air strikes on the Louvre.
For the most part, the music was good — the best was a sad lyrical song that Kim Jong Il sang, "I'm So Ronery", but there was a brilliant sendup of a training montage and an evocative orchestral track while the camera panned over damage caused by Michael Moore. The one real disappointment was the song "America, Fuck Yeah", a parody of GI Joe/Transformers style action scene music which was great for about ten seconds but didn't quite hang together. It had the potential to be the best song in the show but fell flat.
A significant chunk of the movie concentrated on certain anti-Iraq War Hollywood actors — Alec Baldwin, Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Samuel L. Jackson, etc. — who belonged to the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.) and end up mercilessly (some literally) skewered. The movie spent a good twenty minutes indulgently making fun of them, and this really messed with the pacing. It also felt pretty unfair. I think the movie would have been a lot funnier with cameos from more important people (like poor Hans Blix, who got eaten by Kim Jong Il's pet sharks) and fewer personal attacks on actors with actual opinions.
Nonetheless, it really is a funny movie, with puppet sex scenes! (I can't believe what they got by the censors), even if it goes way too far in assassinating the character of anti-Iraq War liberals and engages in an uncomfortable amount of gay bashing.