| Sunday, July 29, 2007 |
20:15 - Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig
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Well, The Simpsons Movie was better than I expected it to be.
Honestly, I was expecting it to be unbearable; what little I've seen of latter-season episodes have been unappealing, preachy, and unfunny, with ever more outlandish situations into which the marquee characters are inserted as increasingly shallow ciphers for whatever political gripe the writers are on about in a given week, where everyone steps out of character (just like in Family Guy, which it seems they're trying to emulate more and more as time goes on) rather than focusing on the domestic, human stories of the characters' interactions that appeared throughout the first few seasons. I know I'm hardly unique in mentioning this, too; it's become almost a cliché that modern Simpsons suck while early Simpsons ruled. I mean, what can you say when you see yet another appearance of Flanders as the universal ha-ha-religious-people-are-scary-stupid meme-bearer, and you long for the first and second seasons when he was just a goody-two-shoes next-door-neighbor who kept seeming to outdo Homer without really trying, and seemed to show so much more character while doing it?
So imagine my pleasant surprise at finding that this movie not only features Flanders more as his old-school, infuriatingly appealing self than I've seen him in years, but in such high profile that it seems they're consciously drawing attention to that very aspect of him and characters like him. In fact, there really aren't that many other characters that make meaningful appearances; I was worried that the movie would just be a long, frenetic Greatest Hits display, and indeed just abut everyone ever animated shows up in the crowd scenes for at least a second's worth of cameo; but that's all it amounts to. it's not a parade of one-liners. Lenny, Carl, Apu, Wiggum, Dr. Hibbert, Nelson, Martin, Otto, Krusty—they hardly even get screen time, and they're the ones you expect to see with some. Rather, the movie focuses its attention almost exclusively on the family, in a way I haven't seen done since I was in high school. And it's quite effective, too.
Granted, they do get in their share of preachiness; there's the all-but-obligatory subplots about global warming and pollution and such, but there are far more places in the movie where they had the opportunity to get preachy, but resisted it. I really appreciate that. (Still, that's just about the least accurate depiction of Alaska that I've ever seen in my life. It'd be unrecognizable to anyone who's ever been there—particularly the part about oil wells all over the landscape, considering that even the ANWR site is on the far northern coast and about 400 miles from the nearest paved road. But then, it's not like they have a strong track record of depicting anything accurately.)
Good production. Worth the ticket. It's bigger than any episode, no matter what Jan Wahl or any reviewer who inexplicably thinks the Simpsons are always saying "Cowabunga" and "Don't have a cow, man" says; and it feels oddly like a reunion with old friends. ...Oh yeah: it was also pretty darn funny.
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Brian Tiemann
