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South Park The Movie 177

"South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" is eerily timely. While often funny, it's as political as comedic, joyously taking the wood to America's booming Morality Industry.

"South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" is sometimes savagely, inventively funny, and, therefore, for better or worse, will be mistaken for a comedy by many of the adults and journalists sure to take the bait and be outraged by it.

It isn't really a comedy, though. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, geeks through and through, have made the most political movie in quite a while, perhaps the most biting film ever about the hypocritical, irrational piety raging in America over the mostly false issue of wholesomeness, popular culture and children.

This movie really takes the wood to America's Morality Industry, the William Bennett - Bill Clinton - Tipper Gore- Joe Lieberman -led campaign so prevalent in journalism and politics. In this country, epidemic and graphic violence and abuse is tolerated, on-screen and off.

But when smutty language or pictures appear, Congress and our many other moral guardians go into meltdown. Kids are caught in the middle between their culture and the nuthouse atmosphere created by many of the people running their lives.

This defiantly subversive movie might send the legions of virtuous right over the edge. Any film that has the U.S. declaring war on Canada is off to a great start. The trouble begins when the South Park heroes finagle their way into a Canadian movie where they hear dirty words.

When they subsequently call their teacher a "butt-fucker" and worse, all hell literally breaks loose, including - here the movie is at its bitterest and most satirical - the insertion of an experimental "V-Chip" into Cartman's brain which causes an electric shock whenever he curses.

Thus a concerned nation - off-screen, our President argues with a straight face that V-Chips are an answer to high school massacres -- sets out to save its children's moral souls at any cost.

This movie flips the bird at pompous adult society in every imaginable graphic tasteless way possible. It's hard sometimes to know whether to laugh or cheeer as the movie goes after an array of irresistible targets - Disney, "Les Miz" Bill Gates, Brooke Shields, Winona Ryder, the Baldwins, Satan and God, teachers, parents who want everyone but themselves to take responsibility for the moral environments of their kids.

In a way "South Park" is too relevant and angry to be uniformly hilarious, and the eerie shadow of Columbine hovers over the movie.

But it is frequently a stitch, and its lever lets up in its savage pounding of the way so-called grown-ups and leaders posture and lie while invoking morality.

The film?s very existence totally exposes the insanity of Hollywood?s ratings system (this movie got an "R" rather than an "NC-17"? It violated every taboo imaginable, from ethic and religious stereotyping, to vile language and a score of references to anal, oral and bestial sex.) In scenes that could easily come from the movie itself, movie theaters all over the country have adopted stringent security procedures to keep the under-17 crowd out of "South Park." This includes the posting of extra ushers at the door to card moviegoers, as if any exposure to graphic language and scatological humor will damage the fragile young.

At the theater where I saw it, adolescents waiting outside easily got older kids and adults to go in with then, and others slipped in the door while the bored usher was yawning. By the weekend, of course, the movie will be all over the Net.

Which, of course, is exactly the point this Parker and Stone are trying to make.

"South Park" was always an idea that geeky people loved more than something many people watched or flocked to see. The series was a hit early on, but has flagged the last year or so.

But this movie is a crowning achievement for its makers. They really show up their mostly gutless, cowering counterparts in the entertainment industry. South Park goes out in a blaze of glory, not only because it?s funny and bizarre, but because it?s out at precisely the right moment, making the right point.

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South Park The Movie

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Sometimes steriotype and generalizations are not necessarily bad. As a matter of fact they are necessary to function at all since we cannot thoroughly evaluate every person, place , and thing from ground zero and still do anything in life.

    However, the geek, nerd, and hacker sterotypes are becoming specialized in the mainstream where I no longer fit into geek (I drink green tea and red wine, listen to satriani, primus, and deftones, and I dont care for South Park...and yes I 'get the little bits and cuts'...and yes I know Primus does the theme.) This is not a problem of society, Katz, or anyone else. It is not a problem. You just have to adapt both your incoming and outgoing pattern matching at all times. My self geek match is dropping due to the shift in geek meaning, so I take geek references in an updated manner. In this case the geek referencing by Katz simply carries less credibility for my purposes over time. Not that the review is bad, just that it's value to me is adjusted.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    (camera zooms to Senate Chambers, Mr. McCarthy waving list in air)

    "I have here a list. On the list you'll find the names of ten Slashdotters who use Microsoft!"

    (audible gasp from crowd heard)
  • by Anonymous Coward
    and, yes, I am even dismayed by this CAP group because they are flagrantly using a biased, weighted standard deviation to skew the numbers! Anyone with a slide rule and a lick of sense can calculate that the blasphemy quotient of this movie is 7.53, a full TWO POINTS lower than the minimum requirement for being instantly sucked into hell. I wish these groups would check their math before launching ad-hominum attacks.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 01, 1999 @09:08AM (#1823011)

    Up front, I apologize for being a semi-conservative 33-year-"old" guy. With that out of the way...

    Just out of curiosity, I wonder if any of these glowing reviews are from anyone over 30. Does anyone past their teens and twenties actually like South Park? Yeah, yeah, social commentary, generational issues, blah, blah. I see the serious content, I just dislike the distasteful delivery. Vulgar language and crude behavior just doesn't crack me up any more like it did when I was a 25 year old kid and I'm just a little too conservative to enjoy crass rhetoric and confrontationalism for its own sake.

    Am I really getting to be an old fart just because I don't think this stuff is that funny?

  • Can you believe this guy? He finds Matilda too objectionable to even review... and it's one of the best kids movies put out in well, forever! A choice quote:

    "I recommend you avoid exposing you child(ren) toMatilda if you can. I found this movie to be yet another example of the subliminal
    style of child abuse from the entertainment media. If this movie makes you as a parent uncomfortable, it should!"


    The only thing he liked was Mary Poppins. Which surprises me, it involved evils such as levitation, death, fantasy, hero worship, and the use of the name Mary, which obviously is slander against the Blessed Virgin.

    Hehe... I ought to write a review of that... I'm damn good at this, if I do say so myself ;-)

    --

  • > My wife and I applauded at this scene (only
    > ones in the movie, however) and I usually think
    > it's lame when people applaud at movies.

    Depends on the crowd, I guess. Our *entire* theater cheered at that scene... :)
  • > So to anyone who has seen both the movie and
    > the original "episode," how do they compare? Is
    > the movie really that far out there?

    Just think of how much you laughed the first time you saw the Spirit of Christmas clip, and do that for an entire movie... I think the movie was funnier than Spirit of Christmas (and they even made some references to it).

    Suprisingly, I think it came off as more vulgar overall than the short, but it's hard to judge.

    Oh, and did anyone notice some of the "cameos" doing voices? I remember Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead), and Brent Spiner (Data from Star Trek), and I know there were others... pretty funny.
  • I must heartily recommend reading that review [capalert.com]. I almost fell off my chair laughing :). Another choice quote:

    • ...but this movie has earned the most severe CAP Influence Density (ID) of almost 200 movies: a CAP ID of 10.65! *Natural Born Killers* (R) earned a CAP Influence Density of 7.46! Most R-rated movies earn CAP IDs between 1.00 and 3.00.

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • By the time I was 12 years old, I knew that swearing was inappropriate in many social situations. I knew that drugs (heroin, specifically) were *very* bad things to get involved in.

    I knew what it was like to live in a completely different culture as a *total stranger*, courtesy of my parents lust for world travel.

    I could hold my own in many adult conversations, and I understood the requirement that one choose their words carefully.

    This is because I was more *experienced* than many others in my age group - my parents had taken the time to actually teach me things instead of blindly shove them down my throat without any form of rational whatsoever.

  • by Analog ( 564 ) on Thursday July 01, 1999 @11:52AM (#1823017)
    Yep, I've got kids. Nope, they don't watch South Park and they're not going to anytime soon. But then again, my oldest is eight. Were he 16, I might rethink that.

    Every person the same age has the same amount of experience, regardless of intellect.
    That is to say, that unless they are brain-damaged or suffer from mental illness, a 22yaer-old CEO has the same amount of practical, real-world survival experience as a 22-year old drummer in a garage band. They may excel at different disciplines, but overall they are on the same level.

    If you really believe that, you've had an easy life. Congratulations; not everyone is so lucky. Whether you are willing to believe it or not, there are many 16 year olds out there who have far more 'life experience' than you do; many of them even have time to see the occasional movie. I don't think that's the point though.

    While South Park is definitely full of what you might call 'low-brow' humor, it's also shot through with fairly biting social commentary. The two are frequently inseparable. Many will see the violence that befalls Kenny (for instance) and revel in their self-righteous indignation at the playing of violence against children for laughs. Others will look a little deeper and realize that it's no accident that the 'poor kid' dies in every episode. This type of thing will go right over the head of most pre-adolescent children. It will go over the head of far too many adults. It will go over the head of many teenagers; but not all. So who should decide? As you pointed out, it should be their parents, who one would hope knows them best.

    I agree with your comments on the need for parents to take responsibility for their children. However, I would hope that by the time a child is 16 that the process of transferring that responsibility to him or her is well under way. If not, the extra two years on the way to 18 aren't going to help much.

  • by Analog ( 564 ) on Thursday July 01, 1999 @06:48AM (#1823018)
    I saw a review of this the other day wherein the reviewer (don't remember his name) described the movie scene, then went on to rail about how that's exactly what will happen, and that the movie was evidence of and a catalyst for our ongoing societal corruption because (sin of sins) it portrayed children swearing.

    It was either the funniest piece of self-reference I've seen in a while or (more likely, unfortunately) proof positive that the reviewer (and probably most of his audience) needs a serious thwack with the clue stick.

  • Stop reading it. Wow, I'm no genius or anything, that came to me in a flash of insight. Jeez, since nobody is forcing you at gunpoint to read it, don't read it! That's the lesson for today, print it out and think about it a bit.
  • Amen. I don't have kids (I'm 27). If I did, they would definately *not* be going to this movie, nor would they be watching the TV series (there's a reason it's on at 10AM). My parents took responsibility for what I saw as a child, and when I have kids, it will be up to me what they see.

    All that aside, I did enjoy the movie.
  • Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:

    That was hilarious but scary. These people are serious...help!

    My favorite line: "Male chorus line dancers wore pink bikini briefs" as one of the vile scenes in the movie. HAHAHAHA

    Also the end of the second review when it's also a Commie movie with Marxist influneces!

    Please someone tell me it is a joke.

    Oscar "CAP influence rating of 15.00" Caballero
  • Posted by The [not so] Little Hacker:

    Please don't start a rant on christianity. What they mean was that it's incredibly dangerous for them, because they don't seem to understand the Gospel well enough yet. There are good, non-hypocritical christians out there, believe me. As soon as I find one, I'll let you know.
  • Posted by linuxrulz:

    Ok, first I agree with you for the most part, parents need to take responsibility for there children, however I do not see any problem with anyone older than 12 going to see this movie. I don't really think theres anything in this movie (or any other for that matter) that could be so dangerous as to change the way anyone over 12 would react to it. I do not agree with your idea that a 16 year old can't have just as much experience if not more than a 20 year old, it all depends on how your raised, if as you seem to think children should be moderated and prevented from seeing certain movies and such, then obviously they will have less experience than someone who does get to watch those movies. I personaly am 16 right now, and I have every entention of going to see the south park movie, even if it means sneaking in through a back door (or calling in some favors with some friends who work at the theater) and I believe that anyone who wants to see the movie should. The only reason the movie got a R rating is because it insulted the beliefies and ideas of a majority of the US for the sake of making a point that people are to uptight about everything.

    P.S. they really have to put a spell check on these things, I don't have time to dig out a Dictionary.

  • I doubt any movie could make me laugh as hard as I did reading that review! I almost fell out of my chair! I think I'll have to pass around that link :) Way too funny...

    I wonder though, what happened to these people that made them the way they are? It seems like they have the ultimate guilty conscience or something. It's kinda scary. Seems like these kind of people are the ones who cause so many problems in this world. They are about the most intolerant bunch I've come across yet. They hate too many things. Not a recipe for peace and happiness.

  • I was just plain scared! Well, not really. :)
  • I agree with some of what your saying here. I think you make very good points in relation to why children shouldn't see it. I think in the same way though, we as adults need to realize that we arn't immune to it's effects either. Certainly more so than children, but adults in the same ways as children get caught up in the emotional response that such films promote. It might not even be that the ideas are bad, but that it's an emotional response rather than a well thought out response.

    This is were we factor in those notions that you mentioned earlier, specifically rebellion. South Park is the visible, and probably one of the most dramatic examples of the feelings of rebellion in our society today. So much so, that as long as they can portray what they are rebelling against in a bad light, people will find it humerous, and form opinions based on that. It's one of the best forms of propaganda that exists. The ironic thing, is that often times rebellion's object is to be to rid hypocrasy, propoganda, and those who are power hungry from being in control. At the same time, shows like these are the very tools used to affect how people might feel about a specific group or thing. Perhaps South Park isn't used to this extent, but I'm reminded of the 3 minute hates that exist in the book 1984. While the hate is to be directed at goldberg, it's easily transfered to other targets, even Big Brother, then back at goldberg again. It's disgusting in a way, because of it's extremity. If a movie can portray a group of people in a way they choose, that re-enforces other people's ideas about that group, even if it is all done in satire, that gives those who made that movie an encredible amount of power, doesn't it?

  • Very good post, I like your points. I'd like to just say that not all of us, as christians, readily accept our morals handed to us on plates. I like to think mine are well thought out. You are correct in saying we all are hypocrites, especially we as christians, in that we still do evil, though we teach not to do it. I'd content that this isn't necessarily a bad thing, in that effort is made to follow what we believe to be correct.

    Btw, I found your reference to the church of South Park particularly humerous.. :) Wether your having hot flashes or cold flashes, ultimately it still means your sick.
  • I'd agree with you in most cases, generally pg-13 movies are much better to air than R rated movies. However, south park has the popularity behind it, and regardless of how the writers wrote it, it should generate a good deal of revenue. Had the writers watered the movie down, would people still want to go see it as bad? Now, if I remember correctly, this is aproximately how paramount makes money. They lease the copies of the film to a theater for a given number of shows regardless of how many tickets are sold. That means that as long as theaters keep playing the movie, they get money. Now, Paramount wants to keep people watching the movie so the theaters keep it playing, so it's a mutual relationship, but paramount doesn't really need to worry if a given show doesn't fill up, they are getting thier money. For this reason, it's important for them to make sure the theaters keep playing it.

    The flip side to this is President Clinton's recent condemning of the movie industry for not being strict enough on enforcing the R rating. South Park is exactly the type of movie that would be perfect for him to use as an identifier as to how the movie industry is doing. It basically came at a really bad time. The last thing Paramount, and the movie theaters in general want is for the government to come in and start forcing thier hand in things, so the theaters are making sure to put on a good show. Once the topic has cooled down and the guys over in washington move over to something else like the video game market, then they'll probably relax thier guard a bit, and carry on more like usual. In the end, they would make more money by sacrificing some of the south park funds, than to have washington get up in arms. besides, the kids will eventually see it, if only on video, and paramount knows that. It might mean less revenue, but it won't be totally lost.
  • Well, I'm in the minority here, but I really don't like South Park all that much. At times the show is funny, they have some talented people working on it. At the same time though, the shock value isn't terribly appealing to me. When I've watched it in the past with some other friends, I think to myself sometimes why people find it so funny, and like it so much. It seems to be a way to rebel against the establishment in a way, both through the right to make choices, but also because it goes against what many of those in power claim to represent. (I think most are being hypocritical anyway, and really don't care.) It seems that this is mostly brought out with emotion though, and that bothers me, because emotions can easily be controlled. Paramount released the movie to make money, and because it's what people, specifically, teenagers want. Any kind of political message is there because it's agreeable to the crowd that would be interested in watching the movie for the shock value and cynicism. Indulgance, wether in power, hate, sex, or rebellion seems to me to be a scary thing.
  • Can you imagine the sort of movie those guys would like? (shudder...)
  • Well, my 60 year old father watches it avidly.

    I bought an "Ohmigod they killed Kenny" T Shirt, which he now proudly wears, much to the confusion of his students.

    The interesting thing is that I cannot ever recall Dad swearing; he smoothly changes the subject whenever sexuality comes up (you should pardon the expression); and is generally regarded by his peers as an upright and moral citizen.

    My theory is that he loathes hypocrisy, and tolerates the crudity in return for the pleasure of seeing the Establishment get shafted. (He's always been a sucker for adult animation though).

    Anyway, South Park is nothing on 18th Century authors. Ever read Jonathon Swift? "Cecilia shits?"
  • From their 'review':
    The most foul of the foul words was clearly spoken *by the children* at least 131 times and
    many other times in a muffled or garbled way. The three/four letter word vocabulary was used at least 119 times. God's name in vain was used 11 times without the four letter expletive and 6 times with it."


    How many times did they have to see it to count?!?!?! They were probably laughing too loud to count accurately...

  • The movie was all out hilarious, I heard to many song and dance routines but they were at the least amusing. I liked and wuld voluntarily see it again. P.s Any bootlegged copies around Yet???????
  • Greatest Quote from that site:

    GENRE: Animated Pornography

    Also, under Content:

    (Quote)
    CONTENT: (AbAbAb, LLL, VVV, SSS, NNN, A, DD, MMM) Anti-Christian, anti-God, anti-morality, intentionally immoral, with the most vile content in the history of mainstream moviemaking; 340 counted obscenities (there may be more that are muddled), 14 profanities & many disgusting bodily functions, including vomiting; bloody violence including ripping out heart, ripping body parts apart, splattering blood, & putting heart in micro-wave oven; extreme sex including homosexuality & pedophilia; extreme nudity including pictures of male & female genitalia, & jokes about the same; smoking by young boy & drug use including hash pipe; and, rebellion, theft, lying, cheating, & a surplusage of other depraved content.
    (/quote)
    In other words, off the scale. :)
  • You Said:

    "Ok, first I agree with you for the most part, parents need to take responsibility for there children, however I do not see any problem with anyone older than 12 going to see this movie."

    Two questions, and neither is meant to be condescending:

    1) How old are you again? 16. Ahh to be 16 again
    2) Do you have children? If you parents are doing their job, I'd say no.

    That fact that you agree that parents should be responsible for their children, but then state that it's not a bad idea to have a 13yr-old a jubilent catchy Broadway-style musical piece titled 'Uncle Fucka', as well as checking out Saddam and Satan in bed whilst Saddam reveals several life-like dildos makes me wonder about your judgement.

    You said:

    "I do not agree with your idea that a 16 year old can't have just as much experience if not more than a 20 year old, it all depends on how your raised, if as you seem to think children should be moderated and prevented from seeing certain movies and such, then obviously they will have less experience than someone who does get to watch those movies."

    This is a horride example about one of the ills of they so-called 'Human Potential Movement' that started in the 60's, which is now only rearing it's ugly head with my generation and the one below.

    It's also a fallacy, as well as mathematically incorrect :).

    Exposure does not bring experience, time does. it is the essence of what experience is. Exposed brings information, but not necessarily the facilities to handle it.

    Look at the impact of children exposed to sex and violent abuse, or, if you want something less moralistic and more on the geek track, the experiences of prodogies thrust into adult and young adult situations.

    I remember a boy that went to my College Prep High School named Bala. Some of you old enough may have heard of him as he made national news in the late 80's. he breezed thru City College high, and ended up at JHU at 12. He couldn't take it. He was not socially equipted for the environment. Most 17 and 18 year-olds aren't.

    Putting a brilliant 12-year old in with a bunch of college freshmen has proven time and time again to be a bad idea.

    What is needed is something that feeds the intellect, in an eviron that matches the experience.

    You said:

    "The only reason the movie got a R rating is because it insulted the beliefies and ideas of a
    majority of the US for the sake of making a point that people are to uptight about everything."

    As someone who has seen the movie twice, I assure you that the R rating was well deserved. It is solidly aimed at adults and for adults. It contained more than enough nudity, adult language, adult themes and strong sexual content to warrant an R rating, regardless of it's socio-political message.

    After you defy authority and sneak in to see it, let me know what you think.

    And try to let me know from the point of view of a 29-year old Dad with two young boys.

    I promise you that you won't be able to...but I well understand where you are coming from. It was not that long ago that I was 16 :)

    -K
  • This nealy brought a tear to me eye, in the very real sense.

    I've always had a small fear that us 'Atari Babies' might look to some of the ills of our Moms and Dads as the Final Blueprint, and ignore some of the Good that their parents tried to instill in them before they fell the hell off.

    I know the yougest of the young don't have the bennies of having a Grandma that was able to instill if not some "Good Old-Fashioned God-Fearing 'Mrekin Values" but at least some "Common Sense" (as opposed to what my Grandmother reffered to as "Book Sense"), but I always feared that enough of it didn't get thru to the 25-34 year olds like myself.

    I'm glad I was wrong. Thanks.

    -K

  • You said:

    " Every person the same age has the same amount of experience, regardless of intellect.

    ...

    If you really believe that, you've had an easy life. Congratulations; not everyone is so lucky."

    Heh. I wish that was the case. Heh.


    But no one will be able to convince me that second and third graders have a 'natural right as individuals' to drink, curse, have sex and be generally beligerant. It's not good for them, or us.

    As as parents, and responsible adults, or in the case of some here, soon-to-be adults, we would be wise to keep an eye on this.

    Rememeber folks, Bill Gates (who gets a nice turn in the movie...heheheh) didn't become as rich, powerful and dare I say, dangerous as he is overnight. It took years and years of folks downplaying the threat and taking their eye off the ball.

    So if you think some snot-nosed cursing disrespectful self-centered and self-absorbed *child* in the real world (as opposed to the movies...) is *cute* or *going through a phase*, remember this when they are twenty and have no regard for anyone or anything.

    If you have a kid and you think it's no big deal now (not the poster, his position was clear) be not surprised when they are 16, bigger and faster than you and knock you on your ass when you try to put your foot down.

    I've seen it happen. Repeatedly. It makes me...sad.

    And in every case, the parent had a 'hands off, let 'em be their own person' attitude, and truely believed they were doing the right thing...

    Slapping your Mom or Dad around certainly does not seem like the right thing to an 'old' guy like me...

    -K
  • I find it odd that in today's world, especially teenagers, folks are so 'causal'...but the causes have nothing to do with consequence.

    When I was 17, not so long ago, all I wanted to do was see Nancy and Tipper burn in hell.

    But I grew up in the 70's and 80's before Sex and Drugs were an unlikely but remotely possible path to death, not synonymous to it.

    It's just wierd for me, someone who likes youthful things, to see a generation that is SO SMART about so much be so oblivious to the future.

    Well, you got the smoking thing right, at least...although i ain't too keen on methods that are being used to drive the point home.

    Preaching aside, my point is this: Let's not rule out or toss aside the responsibility that comes with the power.

    You said it yourself:

    "I have no problem with that, in fact based on what I've seen in reviews and TV episodes, I'd recommend that most parents not let their children see it..."

    This proves you *know* its not right.

    BUT, you then say...

    "but to put that choice into the hands of a bunch of old ppl is ludicrous (sp?)."

    Who else would you put it in the hands of?

    Don't make the mistake our parents did (Young adults of the late 60's)...there *is* a such thing as too much freedom, in the wrong hands.

    Look around you. Can you walk into a record store and *easily* find something you'd play for your Grandma, or a 4 year old? Do you feel safe outside your home? Been to a typical big city? Know where to find the open-air drug markets? Ever been a kid, and seen a kid shoot another kid in the face?

    Ask your Grandma what here childhood was like. Even if she couldn't drink out out of certain water fountains, or eat in certain restaurants like mine, I'll bet she'll tell you that over all the world was still a better place.

    -K

  • What I meant to say was...



    Ask your Grandma what here childhood was like. Even if she couldn't drink out out of certain water fountains, or eat in certain restaurants (mine was not), I'll bet she'll tell you that overall the world was still a better place.
  • by MrKai ( 5131 ) on Thursday July 01, 1999 @10:23AM (#1823042)
    I refuse to believe that any sane person in their right mind would allow a child to see this.

    Before you break out the naphtha, read on.

    As an adult, i enjoyed the movie very much. it goes right to the heart of something that has bugged the hell out of me for many years: the lack of responsibility that parents take, or refuse to take, for their children.

    Now, I'm by no means 'old' (I'm 29, to be exact) but the one thing I refused to get caught up in is the whole society/movie/tv/radio/Canada Blame Game.

    Modern society has, I'm sorry to say, shifted its focus FAR, FAR away from the *proper* upbringing of our children. And the *worse* group is *not* the Moralists...oh no. It is the group that wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater, that wants to remove sane limits because 'limits' in and of themselves are 'bad'.

    Are they? There are reasons why *children* should not be exposed to certain things, and they aren't that complicated: Children have limited experience. As adults it is *supposed to be* our job to allow them to grow long enough to have the *experience* to make good judgements.

    It has *nothing* to do with intellect, rebellion or any other romantic notion. It has to do with a cold, hard truth that often escapes the average mind, but geek culture especially:

    Every person the same age has the same amount of experience, regardless of intellect.

    That is to say, that unless they are brain-damaged or suffer from mental illness, a 22yaer-old CEO has the same amount of practical, real-world survival experience as a 22-year old drummer in a garage band. They may excel at different disciplines, but overall they are on the same level.

    Now, put a 12 year-old in a typical situation of a 22-year-old. No matter how *smart* they are, they lack the saavy that comes with the additional 10 years of life experience.

    We are all smart here, and if we put our respective flag-wavings aside, you can see that there is merit to this.

    *I* know that South Pak is a compelling look into the evils of society *as a whole* refusing to accept the responsibily laid upon them...especially today's career and goal oriented Dads and Moms, who feel it is perfectly OK to leave your 10 year-old unattended for 18 hours a day. If they tun out bad, the blame is easily shifted away from irresponsibe parents. If I had my way, the *parents* of those murderous Littleton boys would be dropping trou and grabbin' ankles...they are just as guilty, if not moreso. The kind of parents and their enabling society who feel that it is not *their* job to monitor the crap their kids watch on TV, the garbage they listen to, who the hell they hang out with and where they get things from that they as parents did not buy, or give them money to buy.

    That's the messae behind the movie, cursing, killing, pandering and taboo-blasting aside.

    I'm 29...I understand this. If I were 12-16, my understanding, or more to the point, what I did with that understanding, is another point entirely, and would most likely be to my detriment, and the detriment of others around me...simply because I just wouldn't know any better.

    The South Park movie contains strong statements about the way parents in our country and society *should be* and I for one agree with the message 100%

    That's why my kids, and any other person's kids I know who's parents will listen won't be getting anywhere near that movie.

    Responsibility is a bitch. Parental responsibility is something I feel a lot of you here haven't faced yet, but when you do, and you know that the long-term existance of another life rests squarely on your shoulders, then you too will know just how much of a bitch responsibility is.

    Go see South Park. Leave your little cousin at home.

    -K

  • MS Word has done nothing but scatter useless question marks all over the web. The sad thing is, IE5 doesn't even display the pages properly.
  • ?I don?t know what you? losers are talking about. You?re probably just jealous of Bill Gate?s billions?. Yeah MS?HTML. Right/
  • It had a message that was eerie, that people are responsible for what comes out of there mouth and that children are going to be inevitably corrupted, and the ever popular one that parents don't listen to their kids. It was hilarious and I loved it. It is guaranteed to offend alot of people of different races, religions and intelligence levels. But man what funny ass movie..
  • My wife and I applauded at this scene (only ones in the movie, however) and I usually think it's lame when people applaud at movies.

    *shrug*

    :)
  • The answer to the question of what they do like is Mary Poppins. As far as I can see, it's the only movie to receive a 100 in their pseudoscientific rating system.
  • Could someone please explain to me why this posting gets rated -1 (flamebait)? This poor AC was just stating that he did not find South Park funny without using rude language or insulting anyone. What's the problem?

    I personally love South Park but this posting deserves more than a -1.
  • It should be noted that the movie reviews on that site are corpulent with spoilers.

    In fact, it's beginning to look a little green, and its eyes and cheeks are bulging out... uh oh, DUCK!

    (Of course, the spoilers only made me want to see the movie more.)

  • What amuses me the most is that these arm-flailing, expectorating, bible-drumming indigniati actually sat there and counted the expletives. One can't help but suspect that they seek out the taboo thrill of listening to the words that they've conditioned themselves to be shocked by.

    I never cease to be astonished by the capacity for humans to be so dogmatic and intolerant. I've worked with a few myself, and it seems that their self-righteousness and intolerance are inversely proportional to their intelligence and education. And they actually have visceral reactions when their belief systems are threatened or put under scrutiny - you can see them turn red with anger and begin to shake. It's like you're threatening their lives or something! They demand that you not only tolerate their intolerance, but tolerate their rabid expression of it... even when it's as offensive to you as South Park is to them.

  • ... of the attitudes of the people behind this site:

    (Note: I haven't seen the movie yet)

    "*South Park* is an *incredibly dangerous* movie for those who do not understand or are developing an understanding of the Gospel .......INCREDIBLY dangerous."

    How can a movie be "dangerous"?

    I can see "offensive"; I can see "disgusting"; I can see "perverse"; but "dangerous"?

    Because it makes you think? Because it might make you question your trust in hyper-sensitive, self-appointed "guardians of morality"? Because it shows that you can't expect the whole world to raise your children for you, and you might have to put some time in for yourself?

    The only "danger" is to the agendas of certain self-righteous, repressive factions of our society...

    Jay (=
  • I thought it was really good, but there were a lot of 17 yr olds there chuckling at every curse. I thought they were gonna get more strict with carding ppl....I look 13, and all I had to do was flash my school id really fast (which doesn't even have my b-date). Oh well
  • sorry....my html got screwed (i can't type).
  • went something like this. (Laser hologram sputters, goes out.) [Army General] "Damn, it's Windows 98!" (Drags Bill Gates in). [AG] "I thought you said Windows 98 was a faster easier way to the internet... (etc)" [Bill Gates] "But Windows 98 IS a faster and" !!BLAM!! (Bill falls to the floor dead.)

    All in all a great movie. They really made it feel like a Disney movie. I didn't expect all the disney musical stuff, but I enjoyed it anyways.

    If you've seen the movie, it's really kind of ironic to hear people complaining about the gratuitous vulgarity in the movie!

    Great Flick!
  • by pal ( 16076 )
    this is an excellent movie. i highly recommend it to any slashdotter, especially if you enjoy the series (you will enjoy bill gates' role).

    i cannot wait until this gets released to the home video market, because i'm looking forward to seeing the bits that the mpaa made them cut out to get the r. (it's becoming very frustrating to me that the mpaa exists at all.)

    i suspect most of the chopping was done at the very beginning (T&P) or at the very end..

    - pal
  • Actually Matt and Tre did a movie called "Canibal, the Musical" before both Orgasmo and Baseketball.

    And it's hilarious. Many of the same actors as Orgasmo.

    I think you can order it from www.crapcrapcrap.com [crapcrapcrap.com]

  • my thoughts:

    - the movie's humor relied on the NASTY, NASTY language...that really depressed me. what i like about south park is the social satire. sure, cockmaster is a funny word. but i timed my free Coke refill so that I wouldn't have to listen to that inane 'uncle fucker' song.

    - the "parents should spend more time paying attention to their kids instead of fighting for their morality" thing has ALREADY BEEN DONE BY SOUTH PARK - remember when death killed kenny?

    so. we've established in the thread that south park, although a hilarious movie, relies almost completely upon things that the "morality police" feel are wrong. jon katz glorifies this to no end in his article, and, understandably, certain people are made angry.

    both geeks and right-wingers are inadvertently stereotyped (I'm assuming) by katz; i was hoping you kids would prove him wrong, but you didn't.

    if you're this far in the thread, you probably saw how the older, more mature, more experienced folk discussed how they'd never let their kids see the movie. (incidentally, i told my mom to NOT let my 11-year-old brother see the movie...partly because i didn't want to be 'cockmaster' for eight months.) and this is fine.

    however, some of us took it to the extreme...blaming adolescents for not living in an adult's world, getting gun control (GUN CONTROL!) into the thread somehow (but that's an issue I'm not gonna touch), and letting God get mixed up in this...an all-out mistake, considering the tongue-firmly-in-asscheek way that the movie handles God and Satan.

    the geeks didn't make it any better. firmly banding together in support of themselves, the general feeling was that south park wasn't JUST about swearing. (i so badly wish that were true.) but then we have the extremists again, rattling on, echoing mr. katz's sentiments about how this was a stunning, amazing, mind-blowing political achievement, more powerful than woodstock in its fuck-the-man-i-have-my-rights-my-parents-can't-sto p-me mentality that us geeks so powerfully cling to.

    this whole mess is an excellent microcosm of the way things really are - most people are pretty indifferent to the whole mess. "what's the big deal with the swearing?" "sure, it was funny, but I won't let my kids watch it." common statements echoed by many a slashdotter. the rest? well, every cause has its overzealous followers.

    the point?

    *ben stein's voice* stereotypes are not based on the common man. they're based on what we see on the evening news, and only the extremists get on the news.

    *normal voice* so katz's stereotypes were more or less justifiable. the man took your average geek and pitted him against the morality industry. and what we got...is now ancient history.

    i promise i'll never do that again.

    vector
  • -PULL over, Sir...
    -What? but you ARE just a kid!
    -You will respect my authorithah! whack!

    cheers ;)
  • To make such a movie really takes guts. Southpark takes all real things that are so taboo and brings them out into the spotlight. Just as sex, and swearing, are right there with going to church. I appriciate someone acutally doing this as a slap to the Americian culture. I honestly think the most of the people who have power are increadibly over-conservative. Sex is a fact of life. Swearing is pretty damn stupid. Come on. Someone made up this word, somewhere in the past, and it came to some negative connotation. Who the hell cares? Listen to what we call profanity. Say shit 20 times in your head, considering the sound of the word and the meaning. That becomes pretty silly.

    I hope soon America, and the world's culture at large, reaches a point of acceptance of whats there is there. Dont try to hide people from it. Ween them into knowing these kind of things. If we say NO DRINIKING, NO SEX, NO SWEARING UNTILL YOU ARE 18, most people (especially the kind that were trying to protect against this sort of thing) are going to DRINK till they pass out, have SEX with everyone around, and EVERYTHING will be FUCK this FUCK that.


    Ok.. I'm done ranting (and i forget what i started this all about, oh yeah Southpark)


    More power to Matt and Tre.

  • ...but this movie has earned the most severe CAP Influence Density (ID) of almost 200 movies: a CAP ID of 10.65! *Natural Born Killers* (R) earned a CAP Influence Density of 7.46! Most R-rated movies earn CAP IDs between 1.00 and 3.00.


    Yeah, what's up with this crazy pseudo-scientific formula? Nothing more ridiculous than a fundamentalist trying to convince you that his ravings are really based in irrefutable logic. Why not just say it's blasphemous and move on?
  • Yeah, just send mail to postmaster@mpaa.com for free bootleg copies!
  • You've hit the nail on the head.

    I've been at University (in Canada) for five years now and had some contact with first-years students every year. You can pick out the ones who had been sheltered by their parents like they had a stamp on their forehead. They are the ones who either:

    1. Can't interact socially because they have no idea what to make of people who drink, swear or dod any of they other myriad of things done by first-year students.
    2. Had no idea how to deal with becoming one of those people and got themselves into trouble.

    On the other hand, if I had kids, I wouldn't take them to the South Park movie. You have to draw a line somewhere.

  • by Dan Crash ( 22904 ) on Thursday July 01, 1999 @10:40AM (#1823064) Journal
    I'll be the first to admit, the first time I saw "South Park" on Comedy Central, I laughed out loud. The juxtaposition of kindergarten construction-paper aesthetics with graphic sexual content was pretty damn funny for the first couple shows. Hilarious, even.

    But Jon Katz's übermorality schtick is really grating on me, here.

    I'm always disgusted when ideologues use the protection of children as an excuse to rape the rights and privileges of adults. (2nd Amendment rights come to mind as a primary example, here.)

    I am *equally* disgusted, however, when ideologues (like Jon Katz) promote children as some bizarre sort of breed of "adults from the future"; as beings who exist on a higher intellectual plane than their parents, and should therefore be immune to the backward rules that we primitives would foist upon them.

    Both attitudes come from exactly the same mentality; the ultra-glorification of childhood. Both sets of ideologues believe in their shriveled bleeding hearts that adolescents are so perfect and precious that their well-being supersedes that of the adult society they exist in.

    But what always is neglected in these conversations is that these adolescents *become* the adult society at some point. You don't protect children by denying adults certain rational rights -- such as gun ownership -- because the damage you do to their future society outweighs the damage you protect them from.

    Conversely, adolescents are not miniature adults. Childhood, adolescence, and even teenage years are still primarily formative ones. Jon Katz practically guffaws at the the idea that children are different in any fundamental ways than adults: "...as if any exposure to graphic language and scatological humor will damage the fragile young," he says. The-Geeks-vs.-The-Moralists. Well, hell! Why not shoot some smack in front of your kids, then? As if any exposure to illicit narcotic usage will damage the fragile young. Why not invite them to an orgy? They know what sex is, don't they? While were at it, let's add some shiny, happy incest, too! There's no reason it should be wrong for a father to fuck his 10-year-old daughter, right, Jon? As if it could damage her! Ha! How truly ludicrous! Those goddamned moralists. Always telling you and me what to do.

    My point is that we *all* have some morality, and we all foist it upon others. It's perfectly reasonable to see the "South Park" movie as a vehicle of another morality. It's actually unreasonable not to.

    And I wonder how much those of us who have children now, or plan to someday, would like to teach the morality of "South Park" to our kids. Hey, if you want your kid to call you "motherfucker" at every opportunity, be my guest. But I doubt that most of us do. We may not base our morality in Exodus, like the Christians do; we may feel that we reason out our morals instead of having them handed to us from on high. But in any case, I wouldn't let my hypothetical 14-year-old go see the "South Park" movie, the same way I wouldn't go buy a bottle of vodka for him. When he's older, he can make his own choices, and I'll respect his right to do so. He can choose to defy me, and sneak in, and I'll find out, and we'll have to talk about it, and he'll have to take some punishment for it. That's the way values are transmitted, it seems to me, through conflict and resolution of it.

    Are the moralists hypocrites? Sure they are. We all are. Unless you're one of those whose only virtue is in claiming that you have no human virtue at all.

    The problem with humanity is simply this: The hypocrites are the only ones trying.
  • Actually, I think Male chorus line dancers wearing pink bikini briefs are kinda vile myself ;)
  • There was another statement made as well..
    hehe... That Windows 98 sucks.. hehe
    Everyone in the theatre cheered at that part..
  • Strangely, where I am to (in Canada) the movie was rated 14-a (similar to PG-13 in the US, except you need to be fourteen). I guess the theatres is really strapped for cash, so they're just going to let everyone they can in...
  • They did get Slashdotted. Check the statistics at http://nl.viewstat.ne dstatbasic.net/cgi-bin/viewstat?name=CAP [nedstatbasic.net]

  • I want to see a South Park
    episode where the kids meet the
    ghost of Lenny Bruce. He was in
    trouble for doing this kind of
    comedy in nightclubs. Now it's
    all over TV.

    It would be funny.
  • I'm 31, I don't have a conservative bone in my body, and I loved it. Of course, I'm a big fan of satire, and I have an especially soft spot for metahumor, so I'm just absolutely giddy at the orgy of social self-reference this movie is already starting to provoke. It is a gloriously elegant joke perpetrated by crudity, and that just fills me with awe. By implying that the message could have been delivered less offensively, you become Mr. Mackey, mmmkay?

    And by the way, if "Vulgar language and crude behavior just doesn't crack [you] up any more", what the fuck were you doing in that theater? Were you under some illusions about it being a Merchant/Ivory production?

    One thing that's occurred to me about SP, that the movies raises the stakes on in a big way, is how people's experiences of it are affected by "Spirit of Christmas". Now I take it for granted that (1) basically all geeks saw SoXmas long before anybody thought of a SP series, but that (2) mainstream audiences, presumably a large majority of people exposed to SP, have never seen SoXmas, and most of them have never heard of it. So while mainstreamers can intellectually fill in the bleeps, they don't actually hear Cartman saying "pigfucker" like we do. (The movie, btw, keeps up the series' tradition of SoXmas in-jokes, I'd say to the point where they're deliberately snubbing people who haven't seen it.)

    So. Non-SoXers will presumably be shocked to hear the kids' unbleeped language. They are probably expecting to be shocked, given the controversy and all, but hearing the kids say "pigfucker" will be a new experience for them. For SoXers like me, the movie should feel more natural than hearing the bleeps on CC.

    GENERAL SPOILERS FOLLOW. NO SPECIFIC INFORMATION BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET THIS WILL PROBABLY AFFECT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF IT.

    I went in expecting the movie to be more like SoXmas than the series. It is, in the sense that 500 million is closer to 10 than it is to 5. SoXmas set a lewd, gory, blasphemous standard, and even by that standard, the movie is absolutely depraved. Matt and Trey knew that I would be less shockable than someone who hadn't seen SoXmas, and they set their sights on blowing away, not only the Mrs. Broslofskis of America, but me as well. Wow. Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here!

  • Hold on a sec.

    How many TIME or Newsweek articles are going to give "Southpark" a positive review. Or that can even look around the crass to see the point. Time spends time on stories about "how to spot the next columbine killers" softened so that even gramma can read it. If I'm not mistaken I read the word "butt-fucker" in this last review, which I thought was good (the review, not the word).

    I'm gonna see the movie tonight (if I can find some bud....somebody, yea somebody)
  • K, I didn't read Time and I reverently apologize to them for besmirching their good name...in other news.

    I just saw the movie.

    Outstanding, great flick, I laughed my ass off. (WARNING!! WARNING!! SPOILER MATERIAL!!!)
    Two great scenes:

    1) The military looking at the Death Star style map of Canada before the Invasion. Saddam (who has been consorting with the devil) flashes a couple times, then the thing crashes. General says bring him Bill Gates. Bill walks in with two guards, the General says "I thought windows98 was supposed the be faster,..."yada, yada, yada. Then he pops him right in the forehead. Great.
    People actually started clapping (the only time they did, and yeah I was one of 'em)

    2) Stan is getting a message out to all the children, sits down at a computer, gets on the 'Net, does a quick search, see's Cartman's mom eating shit (he was looking for the clitoris), then does a bit of hacking (cracking, yea, yea, yea). The good part is while he's doing it,he does that quick sidelong self-conscious glance at the boys. The exact same thing I've done when showing off the geek skillz to other clans.

    Anyway, there are a ton of jokes, more swear words than you can comprehend, a great ending(Cartman goes Anime). Highly recommended, but NOT for the children (unless you want to answer a whole bunch of questions.)

    -Fin-
  • Ask your Grandma what here childhood was like

    Ummm, talking to my mother and some of her much older friends this certainly is not true. I've never had call to break anyone's fingers to dissaude them from bothering me, my mother has. As much as people like to pretty up the past and say we were so civilized, we've always been violent. As far as the people ranting about violence in schools, I have news for you the violence in schools has declined over the past 20 years. Check out an article at FAIR [fair.org]. There is a lot of good information out their if you ignore the TV News. I'll see if I can find some decent books of statistical analysis on this. I know there are a couple, but I can't get to the list I have them on at the moment.

    I'm not saying society is perfect, I'm just saying their is a lot of misinformation out there. I agree with you that a 12 year old shouldn't be watching this film. I like south park, I don't find it objectionable, but I don't think it's for everyone. I find many things on prime time television much more offensive (at least in terms of insulting my intelligence) than SP. That is why I no longer own a TV. I won't go off on a rant about the rest of your postings, I thought they were well thought out and had some good points. I just really dislike whenever people go "The good old days were so wonderful, not like today". my $0.02
  • thal [slashdot.org] wrote [slashdot.org]:

    i do not believe [ pro-wrestling's role in the boy's death [divide.net]] is evidence that south park is something that should not exist or should not be seen by anyone under 17.

    "Should not exist" is bait for censorship. The debate needs to stick with the issue of what the quality of the movie is. As for children seeing the movie, well, I'll do my part to see that mine won't.

    [prose about the link between words/images and actions snipped]

    hearing a curse word is not the same as saying a curse word...

    What I was trying to say was that reading CAP's review [capalert.com] was enough to tell me the film is unworthy of my attention. I can't defend CAP's assertion that it is "dangerous;" however, it's clear to me from CAP's review that the film contains no quality as an object of art that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy [gospelcom.net].

    ... parents should concentrate on shaping their children's thinking ability instead worrying about what their eyes might see. it is really much more effective.

    How utterly naive. Parents should of course do both. My oldest son accidentally caught a glimpse -- only a few seconds -- of "The Exorcist" when he was 5 or 6. It happened be a scene portraying demonic possession. That brief image continues to haunt him years later. As a child and teen, I myself was polluted with an unrealistic expectation of women and a twisted sense of sex that masked its deeper, true delights because I had access to pornography [geocities.com] growing up. I'm sure I'm in the minority of Slashdotters who believes there's something inherently wrong with pornography. I therefore have nothing to do with pornography -- by choice [711.net].

    I thank God for the innocence that my kids (6 and 8) still possess. In our house, we don't draw the line at obscenities. We draw the line at calling someone stupid, or saying, "That sucks." Why do I draw the line so far back? To compensate for society's pressure to erase the line completely. When my kids do begin exercising their "free speech" in more vulgar ways, they'll have been taught the example of just how far over the line they're going. By the time they make their own choice whether to see "South Park," I hope they will appreciate how far over the line that movie is.

    This brings up an interesting point. I don't know when I'll begin permitting my kids to read Slashdot, but I do think thal [slashdot.org] and I would agree that it's the same time when it's "safe" to let them watch South Park. I mean that with all sincerity. It's just that thal [slashdot.org] and I might disagree about the age when that might be. Just how old are you, thal? Have kids of your own, yet?

    south park is a world without fences, yes. if we keep the fences up all of the time, we will forget what is hiding behind them. and that it is when it will come to haunt us. south park is a hilarious reminder why we try to be civilized.

    I like to be reminded of why I try to be civilized by seeing examples of the triumph of civilization. Or maybe there are those who want to compare the R-rated content of "South Park" to the R-rated content of "Saving Private Ryan"? Now that would be a good debate, too. I saw SPR twice. And I want my kids to see that movie. Not yet, but before they start reading Slashdot.

    There's a worldview that believes depravity is inevitable -- that we need to poke around in the feces until our noses have grown accustomed to the smell and it's as if there's no smell at all. Then there's a worldview that expresses the conviction that the depravity of the world has been overcome and we've merely been living through a "cleanup operation" for the past 2,000 years. I subscribe to the latter worldview. "South Park" appears to subscribe to the former.

  • Just a couple follow-up points.

    thal [slashdot.org] wrote [slashdot.org]:

    ...CAP would prefer that every single thing related to south park would suddenly disappear.

    I can't speak for CAP, but perhaps your wording is clumsy. I, too, would prefer that South Park would disappear. It's crap, IMHO. Perhaps you meant that you believe CAP would be in favor of censoring crap. There again I can speak for CAP, but I'd rather point at crap and say, "That's crap," than to censor it. CAP took on the distasteful job of viewing the whole film to enumerate why it's crap. That's why I don't think I need to see it to agree with them.

    ...movies aren't good or bad because they influence people in a good or bad way...

    I guess we'll never agree on that point. Quality is directly correlated with positive influence. Having said that, I'll add that I found a semblance of quality in "Pulp Fiction," a film which I'm sure CAP would disapprove of. I liked the original way the story was told, and I liked the theme of redemption. Still, the fact that I couldn't find a single character in the film that I liked lowers my rating of its quality as either art or entertainment.

    i do not believe in either of the world views that you describe at the end of your comment. i simply believe that depravity MAY happen. and because it may happen, we should be able to recognize it and not let it hinder our own values. and sometimes we should be able to laugh at it too.

    I can end on a point of agreement with you, though I've found my taste for depravity decreasing as I grow older. That's why I am selective about which R-rated films I'll sit through.

  • GnrcMan [slashdot.org] wrote [slashdot.org]:

    ... "politically correct "what's the big deal?" posturing"??? I'm not sure I agree with you there.

    I meant that it is politically correct to be "tolerant," and it is posturing to make a public display of one's "tolerance" by condemning "intolerance."

    [Comments about CAP's "rude and gratuitous" review snipped.]

    You're demonstrating the "posturing" that I'm talking about. You are condemning CAP's"intolerance." Why should it offend you that they say the movie is straight from Hell? Isn't that a badge of honor in today's culture war? (Depending on the side you're on, of course. :-)

    The fact is CAP is an extreme fundamentalist Christian organization.

    Interesting. "Fundamentalist" used to mean a Christian arguing for the "fundamentals" of the Faith, but as J.I. Packer points out in "Fundamentalism" and the Word of God [divide.net], the term became derogatory because the original fundamentalists earned a reputation for lacking -- to put it delicately -- intellectual horsepower. I would say that CAP is a conservative, evangelical Christian organization. The content of their Web site represents an intelligent and informed viewpoint, albeit a viewpoint not popular on Slashdot.

    Look at the review of A Midsummer Nights Dream [capalert.com]. I mean, C'mon, it's Shakespeare (everything they mention as bad ("other stuff") is in the script.) we should be teaching Children Shakespeare, not sheilding them from it.

    I'll ask you the same basic question I asked thal [slashdot.org] -- are you a father? To assume that CAP is trying to "shield" children from Shakespeare is jumping to a conclusion. When my kids are old enough to read Shakespeare, they'll be old enough to watch a rendition of the play (or film).

    And in the review of Doug's 1st movie (which got a good score, by the way), one of the bad points listed was adolescent underware...what?!

    Yeah, I read the underwear comment [capalert.com] about "Doug's First Movie," but in context it's typical of CAP's uncompromising standard of decency. I'm surprised you didn't react to their objection to the '60s peace symbol [capalert.com]. Still, they didn't just give the movie a "good score;" they made it "the first movie to warrant a CAP 'Green Light'".

    I would say [South Park is] in the same vein (but not nearly as subtle) as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal".... Stone and Parker are sharp fellows, if you go beyond the language.

    Exactly. They don't have the intellectual horsepower of Jonathan Swift, so they dumb-down what might very well be legitimate political ideas to the point of depravity, thereby missing audience members such as me. They don't want to effect political change -- they want to make a buck by shocking people.

    On a related subject, I know of only one real satirical publication that works within the Christian community (as opposed to all the secular publications that ridicule Christianity from the outside). It's called The Door [flash.net] . Check it out.

  • Media Index is a company that specializes in quantifying the use of adult language, the number of violent acts, sexual situations, and nude scenes "so parents and other moviegoers can make up their own minds." SP is "minute for minute the most profane movie the ... company has ever counted." The Colorado Springs Gazette [gazette.com] published an article about it today [gazette.com]. (After today, the article will be available for a few months at an archive URL [gazette.com].)
  • Jon Katz wrote, "... as if any exposure to graphic language and scatological humor will damage the fragile young."

    His attitude is a typical media-elite mocking dismissal of the numbing-down of what's socially acceptable. GnrcMan [slashdot.org]'s comments [slashdot.org] about the Childhood Action Project's review [capalert.com] also smack of politically correct "what's the big deal?" posturing. And replies to GnrcMan's comments reinforce the "what a funny, harmless movie" lock-step opinion. But words and images have consequences. A tragic example of that is the story on the Reuters wire yesterday about a 7-year-old boy killing his 3-year-old brother by copying a move he saw in televised pro wrestling. [divide.net]

    I have no desire to see the movie. I can't even sit through the TV show. I never made it through an episode of Beavis & Butthead, either. Heh, heh, heh. Click. I seem to be one of the rare Slashdotters who sympathizes with Childhood Action Project (CAP), though, ( I'm a Christian [geocities.com] raising two sons with my stay-at-home wife) so into the fray I go...

    CAP is trying to quantify their analysis of the film. They offer their reviews as a tool for parents like me so I can decide which movies we'd like to take our family to see. (I'm not alone, BTW. Financial analysis shows that R-rated movies make less money than G, PG, or PG-13. Nowadays, Hollywood has to make R- and NC-17-rated movies to puff themselves up and say they've created "art." Of course, occasionally those ratings merely serve to attempt to make up for bad writing with less-than-mass-appeal shock value, too.) CAP makes subjective measures of Wanton Violence/Crime, Impudence/Hate, Sex/Homosexuality, Drugs/Alcohol, Offense to God, and Murder/Suicide. Sure, such metrics look like foolishness to the so-called "modern" worldview. In Katz' world, Wanton Violence/Crime and Murder/Suicide are harmless unless they happen in RL; Impudence/Hate is lauded as long as it's targeted at people of faith or anyone with conventional authority; Sex/Homosexuality and Drugs/Alcohol -- the more the better; and Offense to God -- well, he's dead, so he's an easy target.

    Am I a repressed fanatic because I do my best to keep my kids innocent and to teach them what I know to be the truth? Hardly. It's my job as a parent to raise them with the values that I believe will serve them best. Do I teach my kids the value of free speech? Certainly, but freedom comes with responsibility. [zondervan.com]

    Those values, BTW, do include tolerance. Intolerant Christians need to be confronted with Jesus' own central teachings -- he freely associated with the outcasts of society while he sharply condemned religious self-righteousness and hypocrisy. But Jesus taught tolerance in the context of having a personal, obedient relationship with God, denying our self-centered nature, and loving -- that's agape (look up the meaning of the Greek) -- one another. Such ideals can hardly be understood by a culture that doesn't even believe in God, celebrates selfishness and self-absorption, and lusts after one another without ever knowing what the word agape means.

    My kids will have plenty of opportunities as teenagers to rebel against my values and choose for themselves. But it's still my job as a parent to show them where I stand on moral issues and to teach them responsibility.

    Katz declares that, instead of being a comedy, South Park is actually a sharp, political film that exposes the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the so-called "Morality Industry." It's a sad, sad thing that people fall short of perfection. The only perfect man got nailed to a cross for his trouble. But careless critics confuse the Perfect Message with imperfect followers. Let anyone hold up a standard for (conventional) morality, and today he or she is denounced as an intolerant, self-righteous hypocrite.

    As I once heard Ravi Zacharias [gospelcom.net] say, "Before you tear down fences, be careful that you know why they were put up in the first place." Ethics and morals -- whether they are based on examples set by Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, old, dead Greek philosophers, or Bill Clinton -- exist to draw boundaries for social behavior. South Park, it seems, wants to show what it's like without bondaries. And ... Parker and Stone want to show me this because ...?

    The Apostle Paul sums it up: "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." ( Philipians 4:8 [gospelcom.net])

    As has also been said, "If you swim in the sewer, you're bound to get dirty."

    One final comment -- if you think hackers can't be Christians, what is to be done with Larry Wall? [feedmag.com]

  • i agree with you that childhood glorification is wrong, as adults are generally much more reasonable human beings than children. they are more able to make rational decisions based on their own personal values. most children don't have these values and thus when exposed to vulgarity will copy it without thought (heard on the news today, kid copied WWF moves on 4 year old sibling. baby dead.)

    now, while south park may represent an alternate morality, we are not to take this alternate morality seriously. do you think that matt stone and trey parker walk around saying "shut your fucking face you uncle fucker" all the time? i'm pretty sure they don't. the vulgarity in south park is used as sarcasm, for shock value, and to entertain our more primal tendencies. an unwise child can enjoy this on the primal level, an adult can enjoy it on both the primal and the psuedo-intellectual sarcastic level. yes, okay, we are meant to enjoy the tune of "uncle fucker", but we are also to know that we shouldn't call our mother that. a child cannot always make this distinction. adults, usually, can. otherwise, wouldn't adults avoid movies such as these so they won't corrupt their brain?

    but what happens when adults turn into parents is that they are constantly on the lookout for vulgarity that may influence their children and trying to keep their children away from it, instead of teaching them how to judge between "good" and "bad" so that censorship is not necessary. obviously, during the earlier years of childhood, you can't teach a child these things. an 8 year old probably shouldn't see the south park movie. but a 14 year old? i would _hope_ by that time he would be able to understand what is vulgar and what is not, otherwise he's going to have a lot more problems than a movie. as for the bottle of vodka, that's a little bit different than movie-watching. there are _physical_ reasons a 14 year old shouldn't drink... knowing when not to say curse words is a bit easier than knowing how to handle alcohol. that's why you only have to be 17 to see south park and 21 to drink (yes, you crazy europeans, _21_ to drink).

    i would hope that all human beings strive to create their own values so that they can _not_ be harmfully influenced by movies, etc. when his own values are in opposition to whatever message or evil satanic subliminal code the media is eminating. we should not learn right and wrong from a list, we should learn it from life and logic. there's nothing wrong with telling a child that killing is bad, but if he asks why, you better be able to back it up. i would presume many children ask why cursing is bad. the simple answer is that it's culturally considered rude. if you want people to take you seriously, you shouldn't use a whole lot of curses. a 14 year old should be able to understand this logic and decide for himself what to say. a child cannot create his own set of values in a world where mommy hides everything from him.
  • i perhaps took your agreement with the CAP too far. you do believe south park should exist (free speech), while CAP would prefer that every single thing related to south park would suddenly disappear.

    since you asked, i'm 19 years old. i don't have any kids of my own (shockingly enough). most of what i say about parenting is what my own father has said. i like myself and i tend to think he did a pretty good job.

    certainly saving private ryan is a more positive influence than south park could be. saving private ryan is probably art. south park probably isn't. however, i'll bet that eyes wide shut will be even higher in artistic quality than both of those two movies combined, yet the cap will most certainly condemn it because it has naked people having sex.

    my real problem with the cap is that they equate "quality" with "positive influence". movies aren't good or bad because they influence people in a good or bad way. PEOPLE are good or bad because they are influenced by something in a good or bad way. the cap's favorite movie would be one that merely regurgitates their values. regurgitating values is something that any english professor will tell you is not artistic.

    i do not believe in either of the world views that you describe at the end of your comment. i simply believe that depravity MAY happen. and because it may happen, we should be able to recognize it and not let it hinder our own values. and sometimes we should be able to laugh at it too.
  • i too mentioned the pro-wrestling imitation death in my comment above, though i do not believe this is evidence that south park is something that should not exist or should not be seen by anyone under 17.

    yes, images and words have consequences. people can and will be influenced by them. otherwise, what's the point? but who exactly is influenced? you obviously would not let your children watch the south park movie, because you think it would have a "bad" influence on them. it would make them say curse words and try to light their farts on fire. this is quite possible. but would the movie have the same "bad" influence on you? would you, an ADULT, after watching the south park movie, increase the number of curse words you say and do dangerous things?

    i would presume that you must say no to this question. you may not _like_ south park, as you said, but since you "know what is the truth" (read: "i know what i believe", as i pressume you are not christ and don't know perfect truth as you insist), your behavior certainly wouldn't CHANGE because of this movie? your beliefs of how to act and what to say would remain the same?

    this is because you are a thinking, rational human being. you can make decisions. you can say "i like this" and "i don't like this." children have the same ability, except their ability to do this is very primitive and selfish. yes, many children might say after watching south park "saying fuck is cool! i like to say fuck!" but you are wiser and older and realize the reasons you shouldn't say curses all the time (i.e., people won't listen to what you have to say if you're vulgar all the time). or perhaps you just don't say "fuck" because jesus says you shouldn't. i'm not sure. but either way, there is a REASON you act the way you do and you have control of it. i believe that if someone asked you if anyone could change your beliefs against your will, you would say no. i do not know how old your children are, i would hope they could say the same thing once they are about 14 or 15, maybe younger. south park is not for children who can not clearly make decisions for themselves, however it is not harmful the person viewing it has a stable system of beliefs, like you do.

    let me throw a christian proverb at you. "give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime." keeping all children away from everything that is not "innocent" is much like giving a man a fish. the child is hidden from bad things for the day, but he still needs you to protect him when south park part II comes out. rather, you should teach him how to judge for himself what is good and what is bad. this is not done by simply "showing where i stand on moral issues." your children will no doubt have many opportunities to rebel against your beliefs and perhaps may take these opportunities. but if you shield them from all evil things in our culture, as they become older and less attached to you, they may be too naive to make rational choices. let them see the evil and discuss it WITH them. tell them WHY it is wrong, not that it IS wrong.

    hearing a curse word is not the same as saying a curse word. seeing a person murdered is not the same as murdering someone. if you understand why killing is bad (and to primitive creatures such as children, there is no reason why they should think it is bad) for society, then you can see 1000 murders and still will not kill. but the real point is this: south park is not real. it is not supposed to be a substitute for reality. it is funny. it is supposed to be funny. if your children are too young to understand that something seen on a movie screen meant to be funny is not something that should be imitated, then they should not see south park. but if they do understand this, there is no reason why they shouldn't see it (though there may be no reason why they SHOULD, but that's beside the point.) seven year olds shouldn't watch wrestling, but 23 year olds should be able to. the difference is in the content of the viewer's brain, not the content of television screen. parents should concentrate on shaping their children's thinking ability instead worrying about what their eyes might see. it is really much more effective.

    south park is a world without fences, yes. if we keep the fences up all of the time, we will forget what is hiding behind them. and that it is when it will come to haunt us. south park is a hilarious reminder why we try to be civilized.
  • Does anyone past their teens and twenties actually like South Park?

    Yup - I am 41 - and while the movie hasn't reached Australia yet - South Park "kicks ass" (or down under - kicks arse).

    Actually, there is little controversity about it here - but then us Aussies - descended from convict stock with our disdain of authority - are nowhere near as uptight as the general 'merican - those pilgrim fathers (the utlra conservative christian fundamentalists of their day) still have a huge influence on your society and values.

    Anything that takes the piss out of the hypocritical "moral majority" is A Good Thing

    Ken
  • Did you read what they had to say about The Phantom Menace? They started out by praising Lucas for the lack of nudity/swearing/drugs, but then went on to point out some of the movie's flaws. Here are the highlights:

    • In "Wantom Violence/Crime" they listed "sword fighting" and "eating of animals by animals."

    • In "Impudence/Hate" they listed "a small issue of a little boy's arrogance against mother's authority re: going to bed."

    • In "Sex/Homosexuality" they listed "statue nudity."

    • In "Offense To God" they listed "forseeing the future" and "levitation/psychokineses."

    • In "Murder/Suicide" they listed "murder by Sand People shooting racers."

    Thank you, CAP, for showing the rest of the world how much of a bad influence The Phantom Menace really is! Even though they admit that "the ignominy in the movie should clearly be fantasy to the young and impressionable and should thus be easily redirected", methinks these people need some serious help.
  • This is just the kind of knee-jerk flame we get all up in arms about whenever it's directed at us. Just because Jon Katz writes an article, someone's always sworn to curse him and the horse he came in on. So what if he stereotyped geeks a bit? It's easier to generalize than to break down the entire /. population into smaller (and equally incorrect) sub-stereotypes, and he needs *some* way to address us as a whole. Jon's just trying to congratulate a movie that dares to go where no one else does. He's reccomending that those of us who are anything like the 'JOLT-drinking' geek (and admit it, if you're reading slashdot, you've got something in common) should see the movie for the wicked attacks it makes on a hypocrytical pop culture.
    Just because it's South Park doesn't mean it's bad.
    Just because Jon Katz wrote this review doesn't mean it's bad. Give the guy a break, for chrissakes!

    ---------
  • Anti-Christian, anti-God, anti-morality, intentionally immoral, with the most vile content in the history of mainstream moviemaking...

    Wow... now I really want to see this movie! :)

    Really, does anyone out there think that reviews like this are going to keep more kids from seeing this movie? For lack of a better term, they seem to be "preaching to the choir". (And the easily amused, but that's not important right now ;) ) Just about everyone who's reading this review will already know that watching South Park on cable is a one-way ticket to Hell... is it going to be better (from these wackos' perspective) if they don't have to cut out all the naughty bits?


    --

  • >"I do not agree with your idea that a 16 year old can't have just as much experience if not more than a 20 year old, it all depends on how your
    raised, if as you seem to think children should be moderated and prevented from seeing certain movies and such, then obviously they will have
    less experience than someone who does get to watch those movies."

    This is a horride example about one of the ills of they so-called 'Human Potential Movement' that started in the 60's, which is now only rearing
    it's ugly head with my generation and the one below.

    It's also a fallacy, as well as mathematically incorrect :).
    >

    Exposure does not bring experience, time does. it is the essence of what experience is. Exposed brings information, but not necessarily the
    facilities to handle it.

    One:It's only mathematically invalid if you honestly believe that learning is directly related to time. A dubious statement at best, I study less than a lot of my classmates, and yet I get better grades. (for your reference, I am 21, with no children, although 5 years of babysitting gave me a pretty good grasp of child development.) Experience can only be defined as the exposure to new situations, something which may or may not vary in accordance with time.
    Two:A child who is never exposed to a situation cannot learn to handle it, regardless of their age. Learning is only possible when information/experience is available.
    Three:Exposure to sex never hurt anyone. In many cultures it's customary for children to watch their parents having sex. The damage is done when the child is abused, i.e. coerced, frightened, etc.
    Four:REGARDLESS of your parenting skills, by the time your child is 12 or 13, he has access to information you did not spoon feed him. He knows what sex is, chances are he has seen genetalia other than his own, and has a good idea what they are for. In essence, this movie will not show him anything he doesn't already know. (Sorry for the masculine pronouns, english is annoying.)

    So what are your duties as a parent? First off, you should have prepared your child for situations like this well before he hits adolescence. If you are trying to control information flow at this age, a:you are locking the barn door after the horse, and b:you didn't do your job in the first place. Teach your child to recognize how to deal with obscenity. And sex. And violence. Don't try to pretend they don't exist, you know better, and so does he.

    Geek-grrl in training
  • When they release this movie on video or dvd they should put this review in after the credits.

    I find it very funny how close minded these people are.

    BTW isnt Big Gay AL white, the reviewer says he is black.
  • by mxs ( 42717 )
    Just a thought ... Is it really that Paramount wanted to make money ? If it were so, they could've simply pulled another Wild Wild West or an extremely cut version of this film and give it to the masses as a PG13 movie. That is where the money is nowadays, not the rated R movies.

    As a side note, I've never seen our movie theatre put a sign about a required I.D. for an R-rated movie up. After the first screening (or that is what I think), they did, however.
  • I loved the movie. If you dont know the diffrence between fantasy and reality. You shouldnt take the whole world seriously. It was a social satire that movie was. I could take evreything in the movie and agree with. But the hell analogy was kinda awful. I could take the swearing, drug use, and sexual imagry. Yes that movie was vile, but it was so funny. T&P should have another south park cartoon. They are funny!
  • Am I really getting to be an old fart just because I don't think this stuff is that funny?

    Nope; you just see through the pretension. Writing a long stream of cusswords is a lot easier than writing Swiftian satire -- doing the former and getting credit for the latter is a great scam if you can pull it off.
    /.

  • Friday's salon dug it, maybe I'll go see it instead of sleeping.

    George
  • From what I understand (this is from a Leno interview), the parts they cut out aren't nearly as "offensive" as the parts that replaced them. Apparently it was all part of the grand joke; whenever the MPAA had a problem with something the creators substituted something worse with which the organization had no problems whatsoever.

    It would seem that the MPAA is somewhat random in its judgements. (Someone told me understatement was funny, so I decided to try it here.)

    -- NI
  • Actually, Tom, JonKatz's been doing it for some time now. He stopped for a while with his article on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it looks like it's happenning again. Sigh...
  • I just loved the fact that I had to buy tickets for my 15 and 16 year old friends so they could get in and then saw it pop up like that in the movie. Katz is right, this movie exposes more of the bullshit out there than anything else I have ever seen. Maybe congress, the president, and every church ladie's society out there should be forced to watch this movie for a month or so.

    And the best part was the treatment Bill Gates recieved, heheh!
  • Jon Katz has kind of a Time style. Good, bad, whatever. He writes like that, and it seems to work for him. It annoys some people. I'm not a big fan of the style (one reason why I don't read Time anymore) but there are worse styles.

    Jon's content is rather different, though. He tends to have more to say, and his articles tend to show more thought and insight than the average Time article.

    By using the Time style, he gains a certain credibility with the un-geek community. And that is a good thing, sometimes. In particular, his hellmouth series brought a tiny amount of balance (I'm picturing a mouse leaning into the wind on a sailboat) to the whole Columbine media phenomenon.

    I'm planning on taking my kids to see South Park. My son and I don't get along all that well (no big conflict, we just don't have much in common and get on each other's nerves) and one of the things we do together is watch the cartoon every week.

    I'll continue to read Jon's articles. If they bother you, don't read them.


    Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
    Homer
  • Yes.

    I'm 38.

    I don't, in general, like offensive language. Boring. Usualy it is a cheap way to get a laugh out of little boys and a rise out of everybody else. I've outgrown both enjoying it and being upset by it.

    But I do enjoy SP. Haven't seen the movie yet. Plan to.


    Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
    Homer
  • It's already far too late to late to do anything about the under 17 folks from seeing any-and-all the crud that floats down the stink pipe.
    So i say enjoy the ride it's only going to get worse!
  • I am an avid South Park fan, but I was truly shocked at what I saw and heard. I thought that I was a seasoned man of bad language, but I even felt like blushing after the first 3 minutes of the movie. Be prepared for this movie, the boys get ALOT more loose with their language and the sexual content is very nasty. But once the desensitization kicks in the movie is very funny. This movie didnt turn me off to South park, I still love Cartman, but I was truly caught off gaurd. I am seeing it again this weekend, and I am sure I will enjoy it better the second time, just because I will be prepared.
  • I'm sure the South Park movie was well past completed when Star Wars: Episode 1 was released, but that leads me to wonder, how did Trey and Matt get their hands on that wonderfully-timed Jar Jar line? Did they perhaps have advance notice that Jar Jar would be a hot target by the time the movie was released?
  • Two comments: "politically correct "what's the big deal?" posturing"??? I'm not sure I agree with you there. That attitude is most decidedly not politically correct, especially in light of recent events. Anyway, on to my main point.

    I have no problem with CAP rating movies. They can do what ever they want as long as it doesn't affect me. I do have a problem with statements like: "*South Park* is another movie straight from the smoking pits of Hell." I think that's rude and gratuitous(I also think the review as a whole was gratuitus, and I can almost guarantee that page would be blocked by filtering software) I also think that this group is way, way out of line from what can be considered reasonable. The fact is CAP is an extreme fundamentalist Christian organization. Look at the review of A Midsummer Nights Dream [capalert.com]. I mean, C'mon, it's Shakespeare (everything they mention as bad ("other stuff") is in the script.) we should be teaching Children Shakespeare, not sheilding them from it. And in the review of Doug's 1st movie (which got a good score, by the way), one of the bad points listed was adolescent underware...what?!

    Okay, hopefully that clarifies my point...On to the next one. Don't worry, this one's a little shorter. I don't expect you'll ever see the movie (and don't think you should if you will be offended by it) but let me assure you, it IS a sharp, political film, with wonderful satire. I would say it's in the same vein (but not nearly as subtle) as Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". (Where swift proposes helping the poor Irish out by slaughtering and eating their children.) (If you want to read it, go here [art-bin.com]) Shocking? Yes. Especially for the time (1729) But, that's the point. Stone and Parker are sharp fellows, if you go beyond the language. They have real and important messages in South Park.

    I'm going to stop now (self imposed limits, don't you know), but I hope you can see my point of view and respect it.

    Thanks
    Casey
  • by GnrcMan ( 53534 ) on Thursday July 01, 1999 @07:10AM (#1823102) Homepage
    I dug up this [capalert.com] review from the Childhood Action Project (A Christian group devoted to saving the children.) Needless to say, this review is almost as funny as the movie itself was.

    Here's a choice quote from the review: "WARNING! This analysis is blunt. *South Park* is another movie straight from the smoking pits of Hell."

  • Actually, Time gave SouthPark a pretty good review (minus most of the colorful metafores of course). But I agree, give the man a break.
  • Nicely put. I went to the movie with a bunch of friends thinking I would not like it too much. I was surprised, though, at the underlying message. All in all, I am very glad to have seen it. I only wish that the people who need to understand that message would understand it.
  • Our very own Jon Katz, to all appearances recently taken prisoner by the Evil Empire and spirited away to their torture chambers in Redmond, doubtless writes from his prison cell:
    The film?s very existence totally exposes the insanity of Hollywood?s ratings system
    And then later:
    South Park goes out in a blaze of glory, not only because it?s funny and bizarre, but because it?s out at precisely the right moment
    So, now Slashdot is even posting feature articles in MS-HTML [perl.com]. That's why there are question marks up there. Checking with the server, however, yields this for that page:
    Cache-Control: private
    Pragma: no-cache
    Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_perl/1.20
    Content-Type: text/html
    Client-Date: Thu, 01 Jul 1999 18:05:40 GMT
    Client-Peer: 206.170.14.75:80
    Title: Slashdot:South Park The Movie
    So it says it's text/html, but it's not. It's MS-HTML [perl.com].

    Is this the price of acquisition, or are the article filters not checking for valid characters? If the current codeset were available, I'd send in more bug fixes. Will we ever see it, or has it gone the way of all fleeceware in the acquisition, locked away from prying eyes?

    What's next? No more "clean" interface, maybe? Mandatory pop-up adverts with sound-clips? ActiveX controls and client-side Visual Basic with epileptic spinners?

    Alas. What a sad day!

  • i thought the musicals were overdone...i would of liked to see more of stans uncle and ned.

    they could've incorporated more of Chef's songs. however, like job katz said...this movie is political and it did have cleverly hidden messages hidden.

    i thought it was great....if you want to see more genius at work go see Orgazmo...tre parkers first non-animated movie....its the funniest movie ive ever seen.
    Sensei
  • I don't have kids, but if I did, you can bet your ass they'd be coming to see this movie with me. I pity children that aren't exposed to strong language, booze, smoking and other things like that, becuse one day, when we withdraw the curtain of protection from them... WHAM!! Suddenly there's beer everywhere, no parents to tell you to watch your language, and you can smoke whatever you damn well please without mom smelling it on your breath. If you disagree, I encourage you to hang out at an American university for a while (Since America is primarily where this puritan mindset prevails). At university, there's always a bunch of people who are pure little innocent angels, but that lasts about a week. Then, their curiosity at these things that have been hidden from them for so long takes over. Others, like me, had parents who respected their intellect, and knew that "dirty" words have no power if you don't let them, that alcohol makes you feel nice and invincible for a while, unless you take it to extremes, and puke, and smoking just makes it harder to breathe. What's the difference? I had the option to try these things if I wanted to. My mother smoked, and I learned from the smell that it wasn't my thing. My parents let me wath movies with swearing, and let me swear feely, which I never did, as I could never understand what made the words magical, they just seemed stupid to me, and they let me drink alcohol, which I learned to do in moderation, and at ppropriate times, none of this drink every night till you puke mentality that many perople who are more in line with the "positive" (read: athletic) lifestyle.

    "Still, you must admit that similar measures have put an end to underage drinking." - Seen on The Onion
  • And these people are esentially subsidized by the government..
    "Tax exemption applies in accordance with Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service Tax Codes."
    Well, I'm going to start up a rating system to gauge these religeous zealots in terms of numbers, so I can get out of paying taxes too.
    I mean come on! These people are quite clearly in need of high doses of medication (all of it, not just one kind, pump all the strongest shit DIRECTLY into their heart chamber!).
    If this crap is considered to be a viable means to become "tax exempt" then the lot of us should be tax exempt as well!
    We're part of an organization (same as they are) that:
    A) reviews published media (same as them)
    B) Interacts with the community (which unfortunately they do too)

    And the way I see it we do a hell of alot more, and a helll of alot more GOOD, than they could ever hope to. Whaddya say Slashdotters?

    The only worry is that 'Christian Zealot, Bigot" is prolly a requirement for it knowing the 'religeously seperated' government we got.
  • as well as mathematically incorrect I have yet to see a mathematical PROOF (I dont think you would know what one was if it hit you in the face you pigfucker) that PROVES anything social. Since there are no agreed upon social axioms it is rather hard to prove something. But then again I wouldnt expect you to know what an axiom is either. You are stupid. If you have absolutely no understanding of something, dont talk about it. As an aside, I am 21 and how do you know I dont have kids. You can bet that as soon as they are old enough to process language they are going to see this movie (right after Kids) But then again I will also read Cicero, Plato, Moore, and others to them as well. You probably only read pop psuedo-science crap so you wouldnt know what a book is. Jesus fucking christ you amaze me. How are people so stupid allowed to breath. You and your like-minded friends should be rounded up and shot, burned, ... Oh damn, now South Park has made me want to reinstate the inquisition, or the holocaust, pick your human tragedy driven by ignorance dipshit. Ignorance is not bliss, it's just stupid. Ben
  • And here I thought the only influence Lucas was trying to exert was on the spending habits of 12 year olds!
  • In the "CapAlert" review, here's one of the things
    that makes it a bad movie:

    > blaming parents for character of children

    Oh no, not that. It's much easier to blame SP!

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