Word: parkerisms
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...painted with hackneyed strokes. While a smattering of books have attempted to redress this problem, among them Jill Nelson's 1993 memoir, Volunteer Slavery, the lives of these women beg for further elaboration. Happily, Nelson's new memoir, Straight, No Chaser (Putnam; 225 pages; $23.95), and Gwendolyn M. Parker's Trespassing (Houghton Mifflin; 209 pages; $23) provide some of the missing detail...
...Trey Parker, 27, and Matt Stone, 26, have had the sort of Hollywood good fortune that must rank right up there on the wish list of slacker filmmakers with dinner invitations from Parker Posey. Former film students at the University of Colorado, Parker and Stone were trying to make a go of it in the movie business in 1995, when they got a call from Brian Graden, then an executive at Fox 2000, who offered them an intriguing project. In search of livelier-than-average holiday greetings, Graden commissioned the pair to make a video Christmas card...
...Parker and Stone soon amassed fans including George Clooney, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and a number of Comedy Central executives who offered the pair an animated series based on characters in the film. The result, South Park, debuts on the cable channel...
...What Parker and Stone want most, it seems, is to achieve the brilliant, bizarre randomness of The Simpsons. In one episode the boys encounter a mountain beast that weaves baskets. One of its arms is a stalk of celery; one of its legs is a full-figure replica of Step by Step star Patrick Duffy. Parker and Stone are not without broad imaginations, but South Park ultimately comes off as just so many out-of-nowhere jokes and images that don't take us anyplace...
...amalgam of clever references never really comes together, and it's hard to figure out what Parker and Stone are using their show to say beyond the fact that eight-year-old boys are silly and the world is filled with many useless celebrities. Unlike The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head, South Park is devoid of subtext--it isn't really about the emptiness of suburban life or the ugliness of youthful nihilism or the perniciousness of popular culture. Nevertheless, it can deliver many funny moments, and Parker and Stone may very well grow up someday...