July 30–August 6, 1998

movie shorts

BASEketball

It can't challenge There's Something About Mary in the lowball humor department, but the movie that lets America know what the deranged geniuses behind South Park actually look like has enough jokes to sustain a 80-minute movie. Unfortunately, that's 20 minutes less than BASEketball runs. Trey Parker and especially the gregarious, goofy Matt Stone are engaging enough on the screen, and their edgy humor pokes through in a few places, but the ruling spirit here is much tamer than South Park's rocket-fuel iconoclasm; the casting of Ernest Borgnine, Robert Stack, Yasmine Bleeth and Jenny McCarthy should tell you that. Although Parker and Stone don't receive writing credit, it's hard to believe they didn't have substantial input; the few jokes that really work are too like South Park, and too unlike the rest of the movie, not to have come from the stars themselves. That unwieldy title, by the way, comes from a sport the two invent which is meant to bring excitement back into professional sports: among the new rules, the "psyche-out," where the opposing team can do or say anything they want to make a player miss his shot.

—Sam Adams