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Joined: Wed 23 Feb , 2005 6:54 pm
Location: Canada
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A slightly less enthusiastic review (warning: contains minor spoilers )
The Ottawa Citizen wrote: |
Simpsons okely-dokely; Movie starts off with a bang, but then -- d'oh! -- it fades
The Simpsons Movie *** 1/2
Starring: The voices of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer
Directed by: David Silverman
Rating: PG
Playing at: AMC, Barrhaven, Coliseum, Empire 7, Orléans, SilverCity, South Keys, StarCité
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In The Simpsons Movie, Homer Simpson adopts a pig on which he lavishes more affection than he does on his son Bart. He stores the animal's poop in a backyard silo labelled Pig Crap (Marge: "He filled the whole silo in two days?" Homer: "Well, I helped"), then dumps it into Springfield Lake, precipitating an environmental disaster that threatens the very existence of his hometown.
This, then, is The Simpsons -- for 18 glorious years, a showcase of a special recipe of one part social commentary (Mmmmmm. Social commentary.) to two parts (D'oh!) idiocy, with a dash of self-reference. There's a scene where Homer holds the pig so it can put hoofprints on the ceiling and sings, "Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig, he does whatever a Spider-Pig does," to the tune of Spider-Man. It's gloriously moronic and it encapsulates the genius of Homer: cultural acuity with a lobotomy. Homer brings to selfish life a stupidity so playful it stands both as satire and, well, stupidity.
He is all Three Stooges rolled into one, but with doughnuts.
Homer (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) comes from a long tradition of half-assed TV husbands, while his wife Marge (Julie Kavner) is also a figure out of the Great American sitcom, the long-suffering mate, albeit with blue hair and a rather blue libido as well. I interviewed Kavner once and asked her what it was that kept Homer and Marge together. "I think that the sex is phenomenal," she replied in her distinctive adenoidal wheeze.
Together with their children -- underachieving Bart (Nancy Cartwright), overachieving Lisa (Yeardley Smith), and forgotten baby Maggie -- The Simpsons provide a vehicle for a subversive social satire that has made it television's smartest comedy, although, like much in life, it isn't as good as it once was. The Simpsons Movie restores the glory, at least in its opening section, and then fades. It has a big-screen scope, but a small-screen heart: in the approximate words of the show's Comic Book Guy, 'Like the Longest. Episode. Ever.'
It is also, at least for the first 45 minutes, "Like the Funniest. Episode. Ever," but you can feel the air go out of the film in the second half.
It's a mystery how a movie starring Homer Simpson can run out of gas, but there you go. After President Arnold Schwarzenegger (Harry Shearer) declares an emergency in Springfield and covers the town with a dome, the plot seems to lose its way and falls back on some of the ordinary gags and characters from recent years of the TV show: the slack-jawed yokel (Hank Azaria), or the trip out of town to be educated by the Wise Indigenous Person.
Along with broader scope, a more detailed animation and some racier sight gags (Bart has a nude scene) than the TV series, The Simpsons Movie comes with a more explicit emotion. The program has always been based on a loving notion of family, but on TV it came with more self-awareness. It served to soften what is essentially a caustic picture of American life -- its central character, after all, is an alcoholic idiot who works at a nuclear power plant -- but in the movie the sentiment is more overt, as if a film audience needs reassurance. When Homer and Marge have a tender love scene, or Ned Flanders (Shearer again) gives Bart lessons in fatherhood, the sentiment subverts the subversion.
In the end, though, The Simpsons Movie gives us much of what we love about the characters, and if there is not enough of some of them, there is something of most of them. It has the chaotic, handmade feeling that gives the show its roughshod appeal, and more laughs than anything else in the theatres this summer. This isn't stupidity at its best, perhaps, but as Flanders would say, it's okely-dokely.
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Melkor and Ungoliant in need of some relationship counselling.
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