# BASEketball (1998)

### reviewed by
Ted Prigge

    BASEKETBALL (1998)
    A Film Review by Ted Prigge
    Copyright 1998 Ted Prigge

Director: David Zucker Writers: David Zucker, Robert LoCash, Lewis Friedman, and Jeff Wright Starring: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Yasmeen Bleeth, Dian Bachar, Robert Vaughn, Jenny McCarthy, Ernest Borgnine, Al Michaels, Bob Costas, Robert Stack, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Last week, many reviewers made the mistake of comparing "Mafia!," the spoof on "The Godfather" movies from Jim Abrahams, to the recent Farelly Brothers' comedy, "There's Something About Mary," possibly the funniest movie in a couple years. If you're going to compare any recent comedy to "Mary," it should be "Baseketball" because when looking at them, you can see where the former is wildly sucessful while the latter is moderately so. These are both films that at least try and take toilet humor to a level of sheer high comedy, but only one actually gets there.

"Baseketball" actually begins more promisingly than "Mary," a film that, admittingly, took a couple minutes to really get going. Here, we start very high: a sorta-documentary on why modern-day sports are dying: because of too much media control. This is where I laughed the hardest - how can't you laugh when you see a mock arena titled "Preperation-H Stadium?" And from this, "Baseketball" promised to be the best of both worlds: high satire and lots of giddy toilet humor, since the film comes from two groups of popular giants: David Zucker, one of the three guys who created a whole new brand of movie comedy with "Airplane!"; and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators, writers, and voices of the hit show "South Park."

In a lot of ways, "Baseketball" is like "South Park" (strange, because it was written by other people): it uses lots of shockingly crude humor, a touch of wild satire, and an attitude that seems to say "hey, we're getting away with this, aren't we?" They mock minorities and majorities (they seem to love making fun of dying children, short people, and Texans). They ridicule the way sports has become such a sell-out. They make sex jokes, bodily function jokes, and all sorts of jokes many comedies are afraid to make fun of. And it all comes across more like a live-action, really long episode of "South Park" than another film in the spirit of "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun."

"Baseketball," as you would have guessed, is about a fusion of Baseball and Basketball made by two complete losers: Joseph "Coop" Cooper and Doug Remer (Parker and Stone, respectively). Over the course of a couple years, the sport becomes increasingly popular, thanks to help from a selfless billionaire (an oxymoron?), Theodore Denslow (Ernest Borgnine - remember when we used to talk this guy seriously? Neither do I.), who dies as a result of choking on a hot dog, which catapults the film into its big plot: Denslow leaves the team to Cooper, instigating another billionaire, Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughn - see the footnote beside Borgnine), who wants to try and cash in on it like they used to do for baseball and all. Will they sell out? Will Cain get the team anyway? Will Cooper and Remer break up?

It's all handled in a joking fashion, of course, and there's a joke every couple seconds of varying degrees, everything from the laugh-inducing sight of the afro-d Stone making out with a Playboy bunnyin a jacuzzi to calling the short friend/teamate of Cooper and Remer's a "little bitch" constantly. And so Parker and Stone can really goof off, there's a rule in the game where the defending team can prevent the shooting team by psyching them out anyway which way they can, so there's lots of hilarious taunts and disgusitng jokes (my favorite was Parker drinking fat from a liposuction of Marlon Brando's ass, which, incidentally, doesn't prevent the shooter from shooting).

The big discovery is that Parker and Stone are, for the most part, talented and likable comic actors, a shock because many actors who do voices for a living aren't ever very comfortable on screen. Parker, with his bleached blond hair, gets the least wacky of the jobs, settling with a lame romance subplot involving him and a sexy runner of a sick children's clinic (Yasmeen Bleeth), but nevertheless milks all the comedy out of it. Stone, the ugly guy of the bunch, gets to be more wacky, and actually does it well. Ironically, the one time a joke really falls flat is when Parker does the voice of Eric Cartman from "South Park" as a psyche out - it just looses so much in the transfer from cartoon to reel life.

The film's cameos and supporitng roles are rather funny as well, especially real-life sports announcers Al Michaels and Bob Coastas playing, well, sports announcers, who, like all the news anchors in this film, have to say wildly profane lines with a straight face. Robert Stack even shows up towards the end on a pseudo-episode of "Unsolved Mystery." I know it's immature to laugh at something like this, but hearing Stack swearing dead-pan is just too funny to not laugh at, no matter what the principle is.

However funny as this film is, the whole falls just short of its many parts. There's a lot of funny stuff here, but it never works as smoothly as it should. Many many jokes fall dead, as well as subplots (Jenny McCarthy literally laying carpet...over and over again), and the film's satirical edge just gradually dies as the film becomes more and more obsessed with topping itself. The reason it's not as satisfying as it should be may be because everyone puts more in the attitude they tell the jokes than they do the actual quality of the jokes. Take, for example, the dozens of psyche-outs we see in this film. Some are funny, but so many of them are just mediocre or not funny at all. Saying at the last second "I fucked your sister" is hilarious, as is the breast milk squirint bit (at least the first time). But putting on a mask and speaking like a hick? Puh-lease.

The chief problem is this film is too much in love with itself, too much in awe at what they can get away with. Sure, hearing a sports announcer use the word "cocksucker" like it was just part of his daily job is funny at first, but a whole bunch of these kinds of jokes, each handled as they're the greatest, most obscene jokes in the history of comedy...well, that makes the film a little bland. It's funny, but if you're want to see toilet humor done right, without all the glitz and glamor that this film has, do yourself a big favor and go see "There's Something About Mary."

    MY RATING (out of 4): **1/2

Homepage at: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/8335/

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