Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2007 9:24 pm 
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A big party. . . entered very late

I'm not sure what "directed" means for a movie like this. The Simpsons TV series and this movie are the brainchild of the original series' "creator" Matt Groening and its "developer" James L. Brooks. This movie that is the result of work by "11 writers, 17 actors, and a huge team of South Korean animators" (The Guardian) is an 87-minute animated feature whose images, characters, and plotting are an enlarged version of a popular, one might say beloved, TV series that has run for eighteen years. The surprising thing is that all these people have come up with something that's coherent, consistent with the series, and in the view of fans, worthy.

For one who has never watched The Simpsons, what is there to admire here? Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor says, "The movie is best when it just riffs on our compacted memories of the past 18 years of episodes. Fortunately, that's most of the time." But for the non-fan, that unimaginable individual—like myself—who has never watched more than five or ten minutes of the show in all those years, this is precisely the trouble, and not at all fortunate. A movie built of insider references will bring no chuckles unless the action onscreen is funny in itself. That didn't happen as often for me as it did for the devotees who no doubt made up 99%of the cinema audience. But I would be the first to admit there is a wealth of cleverness here; and in fact, this movie is not "just riffing" on anything, and does work on its own—even if, for a non-Simpsonian, watching it is a bit like being shoved into a big party full of people everyone else knows but oneself.

The series, and hence this movie, both appear to be smart—but sort of dumb-smart—which is to say it appeals on many levels. It has adult references and witty wordplay and makes continual passes at topical political satire, but its moment-to-moment action is hardly sophisticated. Isn't this true of all animations—that they may be adult in sophistication or sexuality, but their visual effects appeal to the child in us? In fact The Simpson Movie when I saw it—at a matinee—seemed to be most appreciated by the tots in the audience—whose bright little tinny voices merged eerily with some of the characters'.

The film's official summary says, in part, "Homer must save the world from a catastrophe he himself created." But while that's true, the subject of the movie is only incidentally, if constantly, Homer and his family, or the things that they have "created." The Simpsons are the main characters, and they're vivid ones. That's a singularly resourceful baby girl; Bart's a disenchanted boy, and Homer's one dumb and clumsy man. If wife Marge has any characteristics, they're not very evident--except for her enormously high blue beehive hair; but that, for a Fifties-style housewife, does nicely. But the big topic of the movie isn't this family but, loosely, the crisis of the environment and the corruption and indifference of the government in dealing with it—which only follow the equal indifference of the public.

The eco-rock group Green Day gets booed for making an eco-pitch and then sinks into the town's polluted lake to be seen no more. Later when Lisa Simpson goes down the street knocking on doors with her Irish friend to drum up interest in the polluted lake, almost every door is slammed in their faces. Homer gets a pet pig, with which he develops an almost perversely intimate relationship. ("Maybe we should kiss just to break the tension," he tells it at one point.) The pig crap he puts in a small silo in the back yard. Efforts to wall off the lake to keep it clean have been successful, but Homer breaks through the wall with a truck and dumps the silo in the lake, after which it immediately becomes toxic enough to create monstrous mutants. Ultimately Springfield is an eco-disaster and is banished like Katrina victims by being encased in a giant plastic Super Dome.

The Simpson Movie has important references to real things and people. The US President is now Schwarzenegger . Tom Hanks is a spin doctor for a corrupt EPA headed by the Cheney-like Russ Cargill. Homer saves Springfield, the Simpsons' mythical town, from a dire fate indeed. But first it gets encased in that humongous globe—though baby Simpson knows a way out. Knowing the escape route, the Simpsons run away to Alaska, which Homer considers his kind of place because every inhabitant is given a thousand dollars to shut up about the state's natural setting being subjected to every imaginable indignity and exploitation. Will Hanks, Schwarzenegger, the EPA or the state of Alaska sue? I guess not. As the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity.

And though I'm not a fan of animation, a movie that makes frank reference to some important issues in a comic way and appeals to virtually every age level is hard to dislike. The drawing is unexciting. One will look in vain for the kind of visual ingenuity one finds in the best anime, or the kind of magic of sound and image one gets in Disney's Fantasia. What the images have is fast action. This is like Looney Tunes on speed. It leaves Looney Tunes in the dust. Though the childlike element remains, this is more cerebral stuff.

Does this movie "mean" anything, though? Does it have a "message"? Of course it is a mockery of ineffectual efforts to curb pollution, of public indifference and political dishonesty. An interesting foil for Homer Simpson, a clumsy parent at best, is Flanders, the pious neighbor, who offers little Bart the possibility of time with an adult that's affectionate and upbeat. It seems like there's a Hom-lier message afoot: a real dork can save the world, and kids may be best off sticking with the dysfunctional family they've got rather than shifting to a niftier-seeming one they wot not of.

There's a very savvy comment by Ed Gonzalez in Slant.]

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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