Paramount Pictures
I was to understand there would be pie and punch.
Whenever people asked Andy Kaufman how he wanted to be remembered, he always replied “as a song and dance man.”
That’s how I’ve come to think of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The South Park creators may have been slow to believe in climate change, but they’ve always believed in Broadway musicals.
Sure, their lyrics are generally sociopathic: but if you can get past the references to incest, Cannibal: The Musical and The Book of Mormon are less Leopold and Loeb than Lerner and Lowe.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut dives deep into the Great American Songbook, songs you’d swear you know even if you’ve never heard them before.
“Mmmkay” is straight out of The Sound of Music, “Up There” is a classic I-want song, and I defy anyone to ride certain Disneyland attractions without hearing echoes of “Kyle’s Mom is a Big Fat Bitch.”
Same harmonies, only with a lot more potty mouth.
And it turns out that the right to a potty mouth is the hill Parker and Stone chose to die on for their first feature-length offering. Given the weird obsessions of recent seasons—when the whole damn show seemed to be about crazy-ass Stan Marsh and Mr. Garrison standing in for Donald Trump—it’s hard to believe there was a time when South Park could make an entire movie about something as prosaic as kids being exposed to four-letter words (or that people would actually get bent out of shape over it: I ‘member people getting to freak out if Robin Williams actually sang the line “that bitch Anne Murray too” in his performance of “Blame Canada” at the Oscars).
There’s something almost—I have to drag the word out of me—innocent about this movie.
Or at least as innocent as you can get when the movie’s doomsday scenario is about Saddam Hussein in hell, convincing his lover Satan to rise up and take over the world (‘member: this was in 1999, when the real Saddam Hussein was still alive and nobody was even talking about his WMDs). But when Stan learns that some mysterious thing called the clitoris is the key to winning Wendy’s love—or when we finally get to see that Kenny’s vision of the afterlife includes a lot of ginormous boobies—the effect is oddly heartwarming.
Terrance and Phillip (Parker and Stone’s onscreen avatars) may get in trouble for teaching kids the lyrics to “Uncle Fucka,” but there’s little sign that the children are made any worse by this knowledge. Rather it’s the parents who object to such lyrics who hold real malice in their hearts. So much that they’re willing to start a war with Canada and have Terrance and Phillip shot by a firing squad on live TV. As the motto goes, shame upon him who thinks evil of it.
But this is an earlier incarnation of the kids. Cartman’s still an undeniable prick—at one point Kyle asks him for candy and he replies, “Nope, I don’t have any Jewish candy”—but in 1999 we’re still two years away from Cartman killing Scott Tenorman’s parents and feeding their cooked flesh to Scott.
About the worst thing Cartman does in this movie is start spouting off a string of four-letter words when he discovers his mother acting in kinky German scheisse videos. Which is how he winds up with a V-chip on his neck that inflicts Clockwork Orange levels of pain whenever he tries to utter an obscenity. Cartman being Cartman, he learns to weaponize his agony.
A lot of the characters do the same, often in ways that are strangely affecting. Satan’s song “Up There” opens the beating heart of a guy who runs hell but can’t stand up to his abusive boyfriend, Saddam. A wee revolutionary named the Mole also has issues (“Careful? Was my mother careful when she stabbed me in the heart with a hanger while I was still in the womb?”).
Meanwhile, our protagonist Stan is trying to fall in love without losing his lunch (the gag of Stan barfing every time he sees Wendy had yet to run its course). Worse, he has to endure a rival, Gregory—basically the movie’s Victor Laszlo, British and insufferably noble. In one of the movie’s highlight numbers, he leads a straight-up tribute to Les Miserables’s “One Day More,” only with more lines about penises being cut in half.
As in any episode of South Park, there are the requisite jabs at celebrity culture.
Bill Clinton has a document on his desk about cigars; Brooke Shields performs her “famous ping-pong trick” (which just involves a paddle, get your heads out of the gutter, sickos); the Arquettes and the Baldwin brothers are casualties of war; and George Clooney apes his E.R. role as a surgeon who replaces Kenny’s heart with a baked potato. The movie also celebrates its in-house celebrities—most notably Big Gay Al, a character who might or might not be cancelled today but who is always embraced by the folks onscreen. Big Gay Al sings the movie’s eleven o’clock number, “Super,” just when we all need a second wind.
And finally it’s the songs that make South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut so memorable.
There’s a longstanding rumor—probably started by Parker and Stone—that they only made the movie because they thought they were about to get cancelled and wanted to show everybody just how offensive they could really be. If that’s true and why not? then making it a musical was probably the smartest decision they could have made. There’s so much good feeling, even warmth in the songs, which Parker co-wrote with Marc Shaiman (Hairspray). It’s hard to pick a favorite—I can sing most of the lyrics—but for sheer fun, I’d have to go with “What Would Brian Boitano Do?”
The title is a callback to the original “The Spirit of Christmas” cartoon that inspired the show, and in the context of the story it’s about needing a hero in dark times. The world of today is a much grimmer place than it was when the movie debuted—‘member Abu Ghraib and January 6? I ‘member—and it is strangely comforting nowadays to hear four kids singing about an Olympic skater who fought the evil Robot King and saved the human race again.
This is what makes Bigger, Longer, and Uncut a smutty masterpiece: it’s just fun. It turns out there’s still songs worth singing after all.
Extras include commentary, music video, a teaser and two theatrical trailers.
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