Park Placement

Since I pointed people to Flickchart (and started using it obsessively myself), I've not only been refining my own Top 100 Movie list, I've been watching several friends' lists take shape. And it's been very interesting to see what ends up on those lists.

Case in point, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut -- the big-screen incarnation of the series that was released quite early in the show's now venerable run. I saw it popping up on several people's lists. I do remember thinking it was quite funny, but it probably wasn't that good. In any case, it has since blended in with 15 seasons and 200+ episodes in my mind. Was it possible that I'd forgotten a candidate for my Top 100 list?

The first compliment I'll give is that the film does a fine job of justifying its existence. That sounds totally harsh, but what I mean is that you have to ask "why have the movie when the show is still running strong?" (And at the time, nobody knew just how strong it would continue to run.) Other TV-to-film transitions haven't adequately addressed this key question. The first X-Files movie (made during the show's run) didn't really get there. The people behind The Simpsons wrestled with this issue for more than a decade before finally releasing their film, and it still didn't really get there. But the South Park movie does manage to feel like something "more" than just a long episode of South Park.

Mostly, it's in the choice to make the film into a musical. Several episodes of the TV series have featured a song, but the movie is structured in the classic musical tradition, with a dozen major numbers. It's undeniably South Park, while simulataneously being something you haven't (and wouldn't) see on the TV show. And it doesn't hurt that most of the songs are pretty good (one, "Blame Canada," even receiving an Oscar nomination).

They also up the ante on the animation, chiefly in their awesome realization of hell, a massive Bruckheimer-Emmerich fusion of over-the-top, unnecessary CG. With paper cut-outs wiggling on top, naturally. Even a decade later, with huge advances in CG, you don't see this sort of thing on the TV series, because of the tight one-week timetable on which each episode is produced.

The movie isn't all flash, though. The best episodes of South Park have some biting observation at the heart of the comedy, and the movie finds a worthy target in censorship. In theory, making a film would free creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone from some of the restrictions of television, but instead they ran up against one conflict after another while making this movie -- with studio Paramount, with the MPAA, and more. In a wonderfully "meta" twist, the film became an example of the subject it was speaking out against.

And, not unimportant in all this, it's funny too. Laugh out loud funny, intelligent, critical, and crass all in one package? Yeah, that's a pretty good movie. But still, you can't watch the movie and not compare it to the 200+ episodes of the TV series that exist. It's maybe not fair, but it simply is. No doubt, the movie ranks as a "great episode" of South Park, but it has been outdone on occasion. There have even been some multi-episode arcs of the show (Imaginationland, Coon and Friends vs. Cthulhu) that feel just as much like a movie as this does.

So all told, I end up ranking Bigger, Longer & Uncut an A-. Great, well worth watching, but not quite good enough to crack my Top 100 list.