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| | nice review, I agree with a lot of it. The first 20-30 minutes are hilarious but the middle sags a fair bit. It was a great relief to be far funnier than some of the recent episodes I've seen, though you wonder if this movie should have been made 10 years ago. I'd give it a 'B' |
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| | Pretty spot-on. When I first heard that a Simpsons movie was in the works, I had the same reaction as Brooon here did: I wish they'd done it ten years ago when the writers were still firing on all cylinders. That said, I did like the movie more than I thought I would. It had the faint feel of some of the great episodes of the first eight or nine seasons.....maybe they should cancel the television show and just make movies.
The Simpsons television show will almost assuredly never reach the heights of its first 200 or so episodes again, though I still watch it in the faint hope that it will. That is a testament to how good the show once was. |
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| | I too would preferred Monty Burns or perhaps Sideshow Bob as Villain. And I think we would have got the joke if the president/govenor was Ranier Wolfcastle. That aside, as a near-nut-case fan i thought it was a return to form for a show that, as you say, has faded since about season 9. I thought the attempt to give the film a film-type script was well carried out - it would have been poor had it been a series of 'bonkers situations' as we have seen in the later seasons. |
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| | biggest complaint of the movie: skinner only speaks ONE WORD!
second biggest complaint: actually showing otto smoking weed. i enjoyed it much more when his drug habit was implicit.
besides that, i do agree the middle sagged, although i didn't mind the alaska trip as much as most.
i did constantly wonder just how much better the movie would have been with lionel hutz and trot mcclure.
RIP Phil Hartman |
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| | The show that The Simpsons once was can never be again, that heady combination of warmth and satirical comedy may never be replicated by this show or any other. Nowadays The Simpsons more often appears to be trying too hard to keep up with South Park, however this movie goes some way to reaffirming The Simpsons as the sublime-est sitcom ever conceived. Bearing witness to the sheer number of hilarious characters the show has brought us over the years is a reminder of what a powerhouse it used to be. That fans would -rightly- complain over a minor character like Skinner only getting a bit part is also testament to the shows' massive appeal. I walked into the cinema with a sneaky feeling that the film would be brilliant, through nostalgia I convinced myself that the increased involvement of Matt Groening in the picture would make it great. Everything that we love about The Simpsons is in this picture, I delighted in the scenes with Lisa and the Irish boy who's father isn't Bono, Maggie's little moments that hiliariously paint her as the family's most violent member (perhaps below Homer), Marge's scene where she taped over the wedding video was geniunely affecting, and of course Bart's energy and genitals, and Homer's eternal foolishness. I can only hope they didn't use up all the jokes for the next two seasons in the movie. |
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| | Was Sideshow Bob even in the movie? I remember reading an interview with Kelsey Grammar that said that he'd have a small part, maybe a line or two. But he didn't-or else it was so small that I didn't even catch it. Either way, I think that's part of the charm of the show, and part of the problem with the movie. The episodic nature of television allows the focus to be shifted from character to character each episode, giving some characters more time in the limelight. That's not necessarily a knock on the film though-you can only cover so much in 2 hours and only have so much dialogue. So while I liked the movie, I just think that the SImpsons is what it is because of all the kooky (I can't really think of a better term for it) characters BESIDES the Simpson family, and film as a medium is incapable of doing that to such a large scale. Oh and by the way, WTF is the deal with giving Comic Book Guy a bigger part in the series than Apu or Skinner or Milhouse? He's so fucking lame! |
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| | Oh yeah, and did anyone else feel like Bart should've dropped at least one f-bomb in this movie? We've all been waiting for him to tell Skinner (or someone) to fuck off for 18 years. I felt like that was something that needed to be in this movie. Just because, it's Bart Simpson, goddamnit! |
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| | As a more-than-casual fan, I was totally satisfied. Any movie eighteen years in the making is doomed to be saddled with insurmountable expectations, but you know what, fuck it. The Simpson's movie gave me what I wanted in a Simpson's movie. Gags, wit, unabashed lefty propaganda- bang, zoom, to tha moon. The point about Rainier Wolfcastle and Cargill is well-taken. My only other criticism involves Marge and Homer's marital status: after all this time, there can be no real-world correspondent to the co-dependency cluster fuck that is their marriage. Fo. Serious. Probably the most moving scene on CGI I've ever witnessed gets slapped to the ice in a way that just isn't believable or rewarding to the viewer. Marge's one-dimesionality has been parodied before; why couldn't the movie grant her some cajones for once? At least a single cajone? Sheet. |
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| | I think they waited this long to make the movie because it would have looked lame if it were done earlier. They hadn't yet moved to digital production ten years ago; Toy Story was the benchmark around that time. A Simpsons movie would have looked terrible if done manually. I mean, Lilo and Stitch was disappointing in a post-Toy Story world. The Simpsons Movie looked brilliant. I heard someone say not just the writers, but the animators were also working overtime on it. All the fans would have felt let down if it didn't look like the Simpsons, but equally, we couldn't expect just vast expanses of flat yellow – they had to fill it out, new compositions, make it visually interesting. But, yeah, the jokes surely would have been funnier ten years ago. |
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