BASEketball
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Universal Pictures Director: David Zucker Writers: David Zucker, Robert LoCash, Lewis Friedman Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Yasmine Bleeth, Jenny McCarthy, Robert Vaughn, Ernest Borgnine, Dian Bachar
One basketball player gets $20 million a year for promoting a company that makes sneakers. In some countries, you're as likely as not to be killed in the stands over plays on the soccer field. Baseball players vie with one another for lucrative movie contracts, and many a marriage has dissolved over absentee husbands who sit glued to the tube every Sunday watching pigskin spectacles. Yet at one time, so they say, people enjoyed just going out into the field and lobbing the horsehide around and frolicking about wearing a pair of Keds. Today most of us prefer to go to Wrigley Field or Giants Stadium and, if we're into jogging, it's as much to show off our $200 footwear as to trim down and stay in shape. "BASEketball," which bills itself as a sendup of organized sports--particularly its gross commercialization--fights fire with fire in out-vulgarizing its target. A laugh-out-loud movie with more hits than misses, "BASEketball" is obviously the work of David Zucker, whose popular "South Park" TV show keeps people glued to their sets whenever there's no sign of a game to watch.
The nonstop action begins when when Joe Cooper (Trey Parker) and Doug Remer (Matt Stone) invent a new game, one which can be played even by people with bad backs and shoddy knees, putting them on an equal plane with the most tanned and fit athlete. Dubbing the action "BASEketball," the sport uses a white horsehide about the size of a basketball, but you don't have to run back and forth down the court like a nut. You simply take a shot and, depending on where you discharge the orb, you get a single, double, triple or home run. Nor do you have to "cover" your opponent on guard duty. Your task in defense is more challenging: you must psych the guy out by doing something so offensive or saying something so distasteful that the shooter is too distracted to get off a good throw. The opportunities for both verbal and physical humor are obvious and David Zucker, who wrote and directed this ribald film, keeps the action going without letup, parading frenetic activity in both foreground and horizon.
The three stooges, "Coop," Reemer, and a diminutive guy named Squeak Scolari (Dian Bachar), evoke laughter even if they do nothing but stand and look at the audience as if singing a chorus of "duh." As Joe Cooper, Trey Parker sports an obvious blond rug over his dark hair, Matt Stone a pair of disgustingly fashionable spectacles under his Afro, while Dian Bachar gets the chuckles just by being himself. The crowning event of the picture is the world series-like competition for the Denslow Cup. Though the sport had begun innocently in an impromptu backyard basketketball court, it had grown by leaps and bounds after its initial commercialization by financier Ted Denslow (Ernest Borgnine)--so much that promoter Baxter Cain (Robert Vaughn) stands to gain big bucks if the hero's team loses.
The romantic interest is sparked by a clean-cut beauty, Jenna Reed (Yasmine Bleeth), who runs a charitable foundation for kids with incurable diseases. Trey Parker's interest in the striking young woman sets the scene for some productive, politically incorrect verbal humor. When Joey (Trevor Einhron), a lad about to undergo a crucial liver transplant which he is not expected to weather, is asked for a Big Wish, he fancies himself as a game hunter targeting endangered species like pandas. That dream rejected, he asks for a go at Chelsea Clinton. "That's a tall order," responds Coop dryly. "You'd have a better chance at Bill." When Coop asks whether the kids are "sick and dying," Jenna corrects him: "They're health-challenged and survival- impaired." After Coop and Remer take the kid out on the town for a night of heavy drinking before the operation, Joey lies on the hospital gurney, prompting the nurse to complain, "He's eight years old and he smells like Robert Downey Jr."
The jokes do not depend exclusively on sports and, in fact, some of the funniest scenes occur early on. In one situation, Coop and Remer crash a party given by the ice-cold Brittany (Cory Oliver) and, taking a drink from the house bidet, smelling the undies in an upstairs room and testing a vibrator, they find out that they're in Brittany's mother's room.
The sports personality most bitingly satirized albeit without mentioning his name is Michael Jordan, whose promotion of Nike sneakers earns him an annual income greater than that of the entire 30,000-strong force of largely underage assemblers in Indonesia. Flying to Calcutta, Coop discovers a factory filled with eight-year-olds making the product and wins Jenna's heart by effecting drastic reforms in the workplace.
Despite what you may have heard, "BASEketball" is not as crude as such paradigms of coarseness as "Mall Rats," "Trainspotting," and even "Mafia!" It's filled with solid comic performances, equally effective as both physical and verbal buffoonery.
Rated R. Running time: 98 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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