1998 in Review: "BASEketball"

"I'm going to die." "Well, we're all going to die." "Yeah, but not this week."

I want to get this out of the way: I’m not above laughing at a grown man drinking from a bidet. It just helps when the guy drinking from it is an actor.

Juvenile humor is not a deal-breaker for me, but even the silliest film requires some level of emotional commitment from its stars. The problem with BASEketball, a film I adored as a teenager and now find barely watchable, is that Trey Parker and Matt Stone (particularly Stone) are not actors. Or rather, they’re only good at playing characters set in a very narrow world.

Parker and Stone are, of course, the creators of the animated South Park, which debuted in 1997, and was such an enormous and immediate hit on Comedy Central that they thought it was a good idea that they star in a live-action movie. Why not? Who wouldn’t want to see these two weird-looking guys with no acting training and with whom the audience had no relationship star in a film?

To be fair, they had made a couple films before. Cannibal: The Musical and Orgazmo, the latter an NC-17 comedy about a Mormon who becomes a porn star. I haven’t seen these films, but the duo did show a tremendous talent for comedy (and voice-acting) on South Park. Despite their experience, it seemed shrewd of the studio to pair Parker and Stone with director David Zucker, a seasoned veteran, for BASEketball. Zucker was the king of the spoof, having made Airplane! and The Naked Gun in the previous decade. BASEketball attempts to blend the gonzo absurdism of Parker and Stone with a sports movie spoof, and in the end, the two parts don’t really mix.

The set-up is solid: Joe “Coop” Cooper (Parker) and Doug Remar (Stone) are lifelong friends—and total losers—who spontaneously create a new sport to show up some preppy guys at their high school reunion. The preppies are better athletes than them, but Coop and Doug devise a game they can win with their wits. It’s basketball with baseball rules. You shoot from a standing position (“You mean like Horse?” “No, it’s not like Horse!”), and different distances away from the hoop represent escalating hits: you shoot near the basket for a single, further away for a double, etc, etc. The trick is that the defense can “psych out” their opponent by saying or doing distracting things in their eye line: spit beer in their face, insult their mothers, or whatever. 

You can see why Parker and Stone, provocateurs at heart, were attracted to this idea. It’s basically a venue for them to gross out their opponent – and the audience. One psych-out involves Parker drinking yellow liquid from a zip-loc bag and claiming it’s fat lipo-suctioned from “Marlon Brando’s ass.” In another, Stone squirts milk from his nipple into an opponent’s face. I’ll admit I giggled at Parker chewing aluminum foil—and being in such pain that his jaw literally can’t stop convulsing even when the psych-out is over. And for some reason, Parker shouting “Steve Perry!” during a shot, followed by Doug’s “We said no more Journey psych-outs,” is just nonsensical enough to work.

It might surprise you to learn that this is not enough to hang a movie on, and this is where Zucker comes in. Between psych-outs, BASEketball lacerates not just the sports movie but also sports culture of the late twentieth century, when the professional leagues became overly concerned with maximizing profits at the expense of the game itself. There’s a neat little explainer at the film’s beginning that demonstrates how far things had fallen (“The Lakers moved to Los Angeles, where there are no lakes. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, where they don’t allow music”), and Bob Costas and Al Michaels show up at various points to mock sports broadcasts, especially their mindless promotion of the network’s other properties (“It’s all part of our network’s Who Gives a Rat’s Ass Thursdays”). I especially liked Sportscenter anchors Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne coming in to explain BASEketball’s convoluted playoff system, concluding with Mayne’s killer dig: “If no clear winner emerges from all this, a two-man sack race will be held on consecutive Sundays until a champion is crowned.”

A critique of modern sports is also built into the plot, although it doesn’t land with the same thump. As created by Coop and his team’s owner Ted Denslow (a game Ernest Borgnine), BASEketball is an antidote to the problems capitalism has wrought with other sports. In this game, teams aren’t allowed to have lucrative sponsorships. They can’t move cities. Heck, players aren’t even allowed to become free agents. When Denslow dies and leaves the team to Coop, nefarious team owner Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughn) tries to persuade Cooper into changing the rules and making BASEketball like other sports. It sets up a battle between a young, naive player-owner trying to keep the sport pure, and an old, greedy businessman who cares little for the sanctity of the game.

There’s a reactionary thread running through these critiques. Complaints that players shouldn’t celebrate on the field or have the right to change teams are typically voiced by grumpy old men who claim that sports were better when they were kids without examining the injustices of the past. It’s no coincidence that David Zucker would go on to become a hardline conservative. Ten years later, he made An American Carol, a spoof of liberalism about a left-wing activist and filmmaker who looks and acts exactly like Michael Moore. The seeds of this approach are present in BASEketball, the first Zucker film that spends more time critiquing the real world than a movie genre, and whose underlying ethos boils down to Make Sports Great Again.

None of this would matter if the story was good. Die Hard is just about the most reactionary film ever made, but it succeeds by artfully embedding its politics into a story that thrills and excites. BASEketball doesn’t really care about its politics or its story, and ya know how I know? It casts Trey Parker and Matt Stone as its leads. With respect to their immense talents, they are not movie stars, and they’re not really actors. Even in a spoof, the acting is important. Airplane! works in part because Robert Hays acts as if he’s in a real disaster movie, and The Naked Gun would be useless without Leslie Nielsen playing it absolutely straight. There are a few moments when Parker seems to get this, particularly in his romantic scenes with Yasmin Bleeth, who plays the earnest director of a Make-a-Wish Foundation-style nonprofit that Coop becomes involved with. In these moments, Parker lets down his guard and becomes vulnerable, and the film threatens to actually work. These moments don’t last long. If given the choice, Parker and Stone go for the joke. That approach is perfect for a 22-minute animated sitcom, but it doesn’t hold up in a feature film.

Some bad movies deserve to be forgotten, but I wouldn’t say that about BASEketball. It’s a connection to our past. Even in its failures, BASEketball stands as a fascinating time capsule of a unique moment in American history, and I’m not just talking about the reference to Zima, Fosters Beer, and the band Reel Big Fish. It’s a moment when the absurdities of modern sports were still new enough to be satirized, when David Zucker was not yet a rabid conservative, and when we were just between thinking the geniuses behind South Park were major stars of comedy…and collectively deciding they were better off staying behind the camera.