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?
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