Not necessarily the best movies ever made, but these are twenty of my favorites, in no particular order.  Each post for the next twenty days will feature a brief discussion of one film (though one or two days will have multiple posts to make up for absences).

Post 12: South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut (1999 dir. Trey Parker)

As God as my witness, I didn’t know it was a musical. I had, in fact, never seen a single episode of the show, South Park, when I first saw this movie in 1999. In less than ten minutes I just about fell out of my chair with laughter. The boys, Kyle, Stan, Eric, & Kenny, were watching the film-within-the-film, Asses of Fire. The stars of that film, Terrance and Phillip, began singing their song about various acts one can do with an uncle and I simply could not believe my eyes or ears. Then, get this, they do a flatulent riff on Oklahoma! and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Unbelievable, shocking, anarchic, and simply hilarious.

To be fair, I would find none of it funny except there is an identifiable level of intelligent sophistication to all the goings on in this the only feature film version, so far, of Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s long-standing creative juggernaut. It’s clever, what else can I say? What would Brian Boitano do? Any filmmaker who can do a call-back joke based on the sound of a dying giraffe has my attention. Throw in Satan, yes Satan, plotting to take over the Earth alongside his after-life lover, Sadam Hussein (I can’t make this up), then add a particularly cynical, disgruntled, god-angry boy known as The Mole whose only fear is of dogs and…well, it just works.

Parker and Stone juggle these pieces like master circus performers. And they still find a way to make something meaningful out of it, something thought-provoking, about trusting children, talking to children, and most importantly listening to children. Never mind that Stan vomits in front of the girl that he likes on his quest to find the clitoris. He has no idea what a clitoris is, and that’s the innocence of it. The parents fighting against what they call corruption tragically do not realize they are actually the ones causing the problem, at least until it’s almost too late.

Oh, and it’s an Academy Award nominated movie too, and frankly should have won in its category. The film is irreverent, apolitical, and smart beyond all reason. It is also really, really funny. In those ways it evokes Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1967). If that offends you, well…blame Canda.