The question of what suffices for The Simpsons Movie is a balance of realism with sentiment. At its height, The Simpsons didn’t need special episodes to show its potential since it was regularly and reliably the greatest thing on TV. And it wasn’t only a pop touchstone: The Simpsons irreversibly affected a generation’s sense of humour and view of the world.
But before its 10th year, the series was noticeably slipping. Following the episode where Maude Flanders dies, I stopped making an effort to tune in every week. It isn’t that the show crossed a line by killing off a minor character, it was a general shift in attitude and currency that had been hinted at for a while. The Simpsons had lost its soul.
As the show still gets the occasional belly laugh, so does The Simpsons Movie. But a movie bearing this name demands to be something great.
The series has one of the strangest structures on TV, where the first and last halves of an episode will often be connected but separate stories. Reports that the movie plays as an extended episode with improved animation are accurate. Its length is felt because it’s too story-bound and rarely breaks free into situational zaniness. It’s funnier and more consistent than most high-profile comedies. It just doesn’t bridge the gap between pretty good and good enough.
Sunshine
There’s a certain thrill that comes from watching Sunshine up close and projected onto a large screen, but it’s a case of genre-jumping director Danny Boyle composing big images rather than striking ones. Boyle’s foray into science fiction has aspirations to Kubrick and Tarkovsky. Yet, the movie’s lack of confidence ends in disappointment. When a character refers to the darkness of space as a reflection of human emptiness, Boyle doesn’t take the next step of making his space imagery feel merciless or poetic.
Fifty years from now, the crew of Icarus II are sent to do maintenance work on the dying sun. The intriguing premise doesn’t translate into concepts of existence, like worthy science fiction should. Good actors like Chris Evans, Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh are caught in what’s basically a space-set disaster movie, with one technological crisis after the next. As Boyle toys with sacrificing the few for the many, he overlooks the story’s potential for metaphor—an examination of the sun’s function not just as a force of life but as a symbol of hope. By the time Sunshine devolves into Freddy Krueger-in-space, any promise it had gets wasted.
Rescue Dawn
Rescue Dawn is Werner Herzog’s dramatized remake of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Rescue Dawn‘s straightforward approach shows a regular guy forced to employ extraordinary means for survival. It’s a jungle adventure of madness and human limits in the best Herzog sense.
The banality of the plane crash that leaves Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) stranded in Laos in 1965 proves Herzog’s control of effects scenes is behind his grasp of the natural world. Dengler becomes a POW and plots an escape. Herzog rejects traditional narrative information, such as time passed and distance travelled, for the impressionism of how scenes together feel. Rescue Dawn views isolation first in confinement and then in the wilderness. The war-time setting is only a context for Herzog’s universal need—the necessity of having a place on earth.
Need to fly? Email: palermo@thecoast.ca.
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2007.
It has been eighteen years since America’s ultimate nuclear family introduced themselves to the television-watching world. Their popularity and critical favour have waffled in waves over the near-two-decade span of the series’ life, but they have also become pop culture icons and a source of constant comfort and laughter through widespread syndication and DVD sales. And so the question I’ve heard tossed around the most leading up to the release of their first foray in the land of the big screen is why did they wait so darn long to get here? The reason doesn’t matter really; it’s the sense of entitlement Simpson fans have regarding the series and these characters that is somewhat frightful in its level of expectation. (Although if you’re interested to know, series creator Matt Groening and creative mainstay, James Brooks, wanted to place all the focus necessary on perfecting the television series without having anything take away from that. When they finally decided to go forward, close to the turn of the century, there were disputes over final script approval.) The pressure alone to deliver a hilarious feature that will appease the fans, the masses and the studio execs alike would be enough reason for me to never consider making it. Yet THE SIMPSONS MOVIE is finally here and from the moment little Ralph Wiggum pops out of the 20th Century Fox tag to trumpet triumphantly with the tune we all know well, it is clear that the whole “Simpsons” clan is happy to have arrived. As someone who would subscribe to a 24-hour “Simpsons” channel if one existed, I am just as happy to see them too.THE SIMPSONS MOVIE is a rare, successful experiment in defying expectation and pressure to become a film that honours its origins while moving forward at the same time. As the town of Springfield breeds a self contained awareness that requires more than just a casual glance to appreciate fully, I’m not sure how well THE SIMPSONS MOVIE will play outside of its fan base. That said, anyone who has had the fortune to spend any amount of time with the people of Springfield since 1989, will find their first feature to be filled with a humoured familiarity that serves as a reminder for how they’ve been able to stick around for so long. And now that the my Mac widget that has been counting down the days until THE SIMPSONS MOVIE has finally run its course, I can rest easy knowing that all my expectations were met and it probably won’t be quite as long until the Simpsons find themselves on the big screen again.