MOVIE REVIEW: The Simpsons Movie

By Brian Abrams

In an interview last year on NPR, Artie Lange said “The Howard Stern Show is a hit because it entertains dumb and smart people at the same time for different reasons.” He went on to cite The Simpsons as another show that masters this double-natured brand of humor. The Sirius Satellite’s radio program offers lowbrow and gross-out forms of entertainment such as skullfucking and Sybian machine-riding, but Stern and Lange and the gang also satirize on the idiocy of the media and popular culture – oftentimes within the same segment. The same goes for Fox’s sitcom, even after a near 20 years on the air.

The subtle shticks found among the animated community are what give the ‘toon its merit for being arguably the most influential sitcom in television history. It has such a rich, elaborate history of back-stories and character developments, so, why didn’t The Simpsons Movie use all those characters and past plot lines to make an Altman-esque masterpiece?

Instead of the feature film intertwining a mélange of stories that follow all the minor characters we know and love (Ralph, Burns, Otto the bus driver, Principal Skinner - the list is endless), The Simpsons Movie zeroes in on the nuclear family of five, introduces forgettable characters like an Indian “boob lady,” and relies on the more obvious eat-my-shorts-ish puns that appease the mindless moviegoers who, for years, merely appreciated four-fingered yellow people prancing around on their tubes.

In either a lazy or cowardly attempt to draw as many warm bodies into theaters as possible, the same writing team from the series (making up more than a dozen working Hollywood hires) keeps any scathing remarks or observations about the human condition to a minimum. They give mild jabs toward the government, but nothing that compares to the cynicism we’ve seen from them on the small screen for the past two decades. The humor is inoffensive and spelled out for the masses. Like, during one sequence, a Fox news ticker passes along like a banner on the bottom of the screen with a funny one-liner; but, if that wasn’t enough for us to get the joke, a second sentence flies across the bottom saying something to the effect of “Yes, that’s right. We’re putting news tickers in our motion pictures now, too!”

Ugh.

Furthermore, the entire premise of this 87-minute excuse for an extended episode doesn’t have much merit in the way of logic, and that says a lot for a show that has a protagonist that doesn’t require much himself. Here we find the town clown Homer growing fond of a mohawk’ed pig that he rescued from execution at the local Krusty Burger. The father figure takes the little porker home to put hoof prints on the ceiling, give zurbers to on his bed, and cuddle alongside on the couch. “Maybe we should kiss just to break the tension?” Homer asks the oinker – about the funniest moment in the movie, but not that it makes much sense why the dad would take so much interest in the pig in the first place.

On the television show, he would just have just assumed the Krusty Burger employees chuck the farm animal in one of the fryers, but, here, “Spiderpig” is a plot device that gets Homer to pollute Lake Springfield with a silo of shit, leading to the Environmental Protection Agency’s villainous Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks, whom, in my humble opinion, they should have reprised his role as the evil industrialist Hank Scorpio) who conspires to wipe the town off the map for good.

Stern’s 1997 biopic blockbuster Private Parts offered a likeable story for those unfamiliar (or unimpressed) with the shock jock’s FM career, but maintained an edge that stayed true to the radio days on which it was based. If only the army of writers behind The Simpsons Movie could have found the same balance, or at least cared enough to try.