Matt n Trey

I watched Team America a week or two ago and loved it. Funny stuff. Part of the amusement was how much they bagged actors. I watched the special features on the DVD and they mentioned that Sean Penn complained about the movie. Intrigued I decided to look it up.

Here's what Parker and Stone said about it: http://actionadventure.about.com/od/teamamericaworldpolice/f/aatawpfaq4.htm. Here's what they said Penn said:

"He shows himself to be exactly what I think we did in the movie," Stone said. "When he reacted, he said he’s not mad about being in the movie, but he obviously is. I mean, there’s so much vitriol in the letter, but the thing is, he said it like, 'I don't care about my own image and stuff, but when you encourage people not to vote' – which isn’t what we did – 'You cross a line' and all this stuff.

Parker added, "We were baffled too because I mean, we read the letter and it was like okay, well, he seems to be pissed off. But there’s no single thing he could have done to help this movie more. And now we’re on the front page of everything again. It’s like, you go to Drudge Report, big picture of Team America, Sean Penn’s letter, and I’m just like, 'Thanks.' I mean, we’re seriously like, 'Dude, thank you.' It’s hysterical because nothing could make us happier. Sean Penn’s pissed, like Spicoli’s pissed at you. F*cking right on, dude. What does he think, that we’re going to be like, 'Dude, Sean Penn’s really mad at us. What should we do?'"

Fair enough. I decided to check out the letter itself which can be found at http://www.drudgereport.com/penn.htm.

Uh... is it just me or did Penn not mention a thing about Team America? It seems to me Parker and Stone were just using it to promote their movie. What he did say was that Stone and Parker were off the mark in a Rolling Stone article saying that people shouldn't vote if they don't understand the issues when in Penn's opinion the key thing to push isn't not voting or even voting while ignorant, but finding stuff out and ceasing to be ignorant. I'm not a big supporter on voting since I consider it a farce, but Penn gets my thumbs up on the smiting of ignorance demons. The way Parker and Stone portray Penn's letter is more off the mark than what the movie Pearl Harbour was. Did they even bother to read the letter before opening their dumb mouths or were they so embarrassed they thought they could redeem themselves by pretending the letter's cool instead?

In other news I watched a preview screening of Skeleton Key tonight. Poor rating but a fairly decent movie IMO. Poor rating was probably because it's advertised like a horror movie when it's not gorey or even particularly scarey which is what most horror fans want. It's more like a supernatural thriller I guess. [Spoiler Alert] It's a bit of a ripoff of Hypnotic's plot though.

Oh yeah, I should bag some movies too. Napolean Dynamite and Garden State both sucked arse. I found Garden State to be kinda pretentious and try-hard artsy. Then again it does aim at a late teen audience and I seem to remember a lotta people around that age liking to pretend they're deep with films like this. There's nothing particularly deep about it though. I found it kinda boring. About Schmidt, which I also watched recently, was boring in a similar way but at least it didn't come off quite as amateurish and try-hard as Garden State. But it probably was significantly more boring.

I'd better stop before I turn this into yet another movie blog.