How's Your News?

How's Your News? (1999, 82 mins). Moments of both hilarity and absurd beauty create a tender travelogue and skewed guide to the USA's psychogeography, through the eyes of two men with cerebral palsy, two men with down syndrome and a legally blind and mentally disabled woman (whos microphone manner is second to none). Directed by the writer and friend of McSweenys Arthur Bradford (whose surreal collection of short stories, Dogwalker, shares a similar tone of absurdity and poeticism) and produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of South Park). As the Village Voice states;

"The stars seem to bring out the best in the people they meet. Soft-spoken Costello sums up Texas with a poetic specificity hewn from cultural memory ("a good place to have cowboys, guns, boots, and hats"); Bird's unintelligible speech, far from signifying nothing, becomes a Rorschach test for his interviewees, and his imitation of a Texas livestock auctioneer might as well be the real thing. Soap opera connoisseur Simonson (whose nightly prayers include David Hasselhoff) regales people with celebrity impersonations, the better joke being that they all sound more or less the same. And Harrington has absorbed the dramatic imperatives of news presentation ("We are live in an Arizona auto repair shop," she announces, investigating the status of their busted RV) and the inalienable right to be Aretha. Unleashing "Respect" in a Vegas karaoke booth, she careens from note to note while virtual-reality non sequiturs morph on the screen behind her."

Wonderful. As if that weren't enough, you can join the team on myspace in their current incarnation as a band, and listen to their wonderful songs.

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