Tuesday, March 18, 2014

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut


SONG IS A FOUR LETTER WORD

Nurse Tameka seems to have been adding something to Norman’s daily regimen of vitamins, minerals and calves’ foot jelly. He seems to have more and more energy these days. Recently, he’s been on something of a tear. He's been racing up and down the halls of Chateau Maine, emptying the closets and placing all the contents in alphabetical and color-coded order. I threw him out of the kitchen when I found the allspice and the ant poison next to each other on the shelf. Nurse Tameka and Nurse Lynn are trying desperately to keep him in line with occupational therapy. All three were weaving baskets of lovely colored construction paper last night.

I spent most of the morning on the telephone with my lawyers at Fajer and Hellmann. I've decided to sue CyberCistern, my ISP, over their shutting down of my VickiCam website. There is nothing obscene about nude yoga exercises, even when done by Norman; CyberCistern’s insinuations that I am a common pornographer are absolutely repellant. My lawyers are demanding a seven-figure settlement for damages to my pristine, family friendly image.

I needed a good musical to get the VickiCam problems out of my system, so Nurse Lynn suggested that I familiarize myself with some of the more modern trends in movie musical comedy by watching South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut . Nurse Lynn tells me that this is an expanded version of a weekly TV series that airs on some cable TV channel of which I've never heard. I only pay attention to the ones from which I get residuals.

I was expecting one of those glorious MGM Technicolor extravaganzas but this film stars some cutout paper dolls that live in the mountains of Colorado. The animation style is second grade crude, the visual artistry is virtually nil, but the film is one of the choicest musical films to emerge from Hollywood in decades. The film starts with a wonderful opening number ( Quiet Mountain Town ) that quickly introduces us to all the major characters, themes, and style of presentation. This creates the world of the film quickly and succinctly (musical theater 101), takes the audience to its audacious alternate universe, and then, rules established, has great fun letting all hell start to break loose. Language that made my cheeks inflame spouts from the third grade; Canadians communicate by tap dance and flatulence (a device stolen from one of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut); celebrities are lampooned in disgusting ways; and Satan sings a song lifted directly from Menken and Ashman’s heroine ‘want’ songs from The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast while fending off the advances of Saddam Hussein. Another great moment is a spot-on parody of the Act I Finale of Les Miserables , right down to the flag waving.

After the initial shock, I was transfixed, not only because Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the warped minds behind South Park, have accurately skewered so much of what is wrong with American pop culture and our attitudes toward language, sex and violence in the movies, but because they also have constructed a musical that is as strong as most of the MGM offerings of decades ago. The songs grow out of plot and character and advance the theme and illuminate motive, as well as being riotously funny. This is no family entertainment but a well-disguised sermon on the dangers of censorship and the use of 'protecting the children' as an excuse to attack the rights of others.

I am asking my lawyers to inquire into the stage rights for the piece as I think the part of Sheila Bloslovksy was obviously written for me and I would be able to bring the house down with my rendition of Blame Canada . Of course, the stage version would have to be refocused a little bit to beef up my role so I think the title will need to be changed to Sheila’s Park - Bigger, Longer, and Vicki Lester but I'm sure that can be worked out in contract negotiations.


Codependent Satan. Exploding baked potatoes. Gay USO entertainment. Gratuitous Brian Boitano. Befuddled guidance counselors. Canadian accents. Exploding Baldwin brothers. Gratuitous Winona Ryder. Winona Ryder ping-pong. Dead Bill Gates.

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