October 19, 2004
Freedom Costs a Buck-Oh-Five . . .
. . . And a ticket to see the matinee showing of Team America: World Police on opening day costs $5. Go figure.
I know this because I was at that showing (beginning 4:20 PM last Friday afternoon) with a few local patriotic types. We enjoyed ourselves immensely, in a subversive sort of way, but I'm not sure that the process of keeping things quiet and concocting multiple outlandish tales to further muddy the waters wasn't even more fun than going to the movie itself.
My personal rating of the feature was a 62%. I kinda hate makng value judgments on things like this because I can't help feeling that maybe it ought to be a good bit higher or (more likely) considerably lower. But this pretty much works. The humor was over-the-top, and largely low-brow . . . but it was entertaining. And, after months of listening to hardcore conservative schtick . . . I needed it.
Not that the jabs at liberals weren't vastly entertaining as well, but it isn't the frothy-mouthed liberal wackos that I have to put up with all the time, so it was less of a release.
I can't really recommend this movie to many people. I thought it was funny a lot more often than it was stupid. In addition to poking timely fun at all political extremes, there was much wry skewering of the action flick genre. They also made excellent (and unexpected) use of music. A good portion of the best laughs came from the songs, and it would not be far off to classify this movie as a musical (of sorts). My personal favorite was the parody of patriotic country-western sludge (the title of this post comes from that song), but there were plenty of great numbers. However . . .
If you aren't easily offended . . . no, scratch that. If you're very nearly impossible to offend, and you are sick unto death of the rhetoric of one or both political parties, or just of election news in general . . . go see this movie. Otherwise, stay far away. Really. (That goes for you, too, Anna . . . I know you're sick of election crap, but . . . don't.)
And . . . There it is. Mystery solved. I sneaked off campus and watched a movie that most of LeTourneau would not approve of, for one reason or another, and was generally entertained by my small corner of subversion and by messing with peoples' heads.
Ha ha ha.
P. S. Keep this little incident in mind when we watch Rashomon in a few weeks. That is all.
Posted by Jared at October 19, 2004 11:59 PM | TrackBack