Ray Pride

While it’s taken eighteen years to get blown up to movie scale, the marketing of "The Simpsons Movie" has taken twists and turns the past few weeks, with a screening in time for most reviewers’ deadlines added only at the end of last week.

While Fox has in the past few years withheld bad movies from reviewers until the last minute, the rumored reason here was to prevent all the jokes from getting repeated. While the jokes are nonstop from the first frame to the last, if you read five reviews and each give away five jokes with context, there’s twenty-five little "oof!"s you’ll no longer have in the dark with a paying, tickled audience.

The question of spoilers in general came up in a Sunday op-ed by Village Voice writer Nathan Lee, whose passionately empurpled prose is also featured in Film Comment, in which he rows for spoilers. Of the "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" early reviews, Lee writes, "Personally, I couldn’t care less about the fate of the neurotic boy wizard. Professionally—as a film critic who might be assigned to review the movie version someday I hope he croaks. I’m a sucker for bleak endings... I’m that terrible thing, the film critic [who isn’t afraid to use spoilers]... [T]here isn’t a single frame of "The Number 23" I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail... I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre. To spoil or not to spoil involves larger questions about the role of the critic, the needs of the reader and the changes to both caused by the scale, speed and outlaw spirit of Web-based commentary..." The piece should be free until next Sunday; it’s worth the read if your interest is sparked. His ruminations run deeper than, "If Maggie were to speak her first words, should you tell?"

While almost all of the roaring eighty-eight minutes of "The Simpsons Movie" was fresh to me, the reason why is also the reason why some fast-moving bits and details were lost to me: I’ve seldom seen more than five minutes of the series in all its years on the air. A younger friend of mine, a morbid joker, is always amused to bring up the rationale I gave her: with a broken leg, dengue fever or a long, terminal illness, I would have dozens of hours of "The Simpsons" to while away the eon (four hundred episodes, twenty-two minutes each...) More practically, I stopped watching television altogether for several years as part of a pledge after some seismic personal shifts. After that, watching anything filled with commercial breaks grated. (Series on DVD: different affair.)

A reviewer’s personal context as a confessional form of dancing around the plot: yes, there is a plot, about love and family and saving the planet (with a score by hero-scoring Hans Zimmer) and the most inspired throwaway joke is orthographic, approximately so: ",______________." The credits, as would be expected, nay, demanded, are rewarding to watch to the very end. (If you leave, you’ll never understand what "Spider-Pig (Chorale)" means.) The script, credited to "Simpsons" veterans James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Ian Maxstone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti, leans heavily on irreverence but gratifyingly more so on the verbally absurd. Even out of context, lines honed to silly perfection like "I can’t believe everyone in this theater is paying $10 for something they can see for free on TV"; "This Book doesn’t haven any answers"; "I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!"; "If you can find a greasier sandwich, you’re in Mexico"; "I miss Danny DeVito"; "That could be anyone’s pig crap silo"; "What’s that ominous glow in the distance" and "The top of his head is still showing, claw at it" have a precision to be admired, as do various bursts of animal cruelty, including a lot of business with cats and a burst of penguinicide.

A few notable, arcane references and parallels: The Fox logo has an homage to the gag that opens Frank Tashlin's immortal "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?"; a sequence scored to a Carpenters song has all the moony yet moving sap of similar usages in Todd Haynes’ "Superstar"; a terrific frame seen from atop a hillside of a city in flames being bombarded by helicopters matches exactly the last shot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s "Charisma"; and a sustained shot in the naked skateboarding scene shows gratifying invention, as does Bart’s opening chalkboard session. My keenest, dearest piece of advice: if you want to see it, see it cold, and leave at home the know-it-all who will spurt with laughter at even the gags he or she doesn’t understand.

"The Simpsons Movie" opens Friday.

(2007-07-24)

Also by Ray Pride

Space Odyssey
Scots-born director Danny Boyle’s protean imagination tends to the tactile, the immediate, the blood-rushing, the trippy: think "Trainspotting," "Miracles," "28 Days Later" and its sequel, "28 Weeks Later," which he supervised. His latest, "Sunshine," is no different, tending more toward the mind-expanding drift of "2001: A Space Odyssey" or the "Solaris" of Tarkovsky and of Soderbergh or the claustrophobia of "Das Boot" or "Wages of Fear" than to the pop-pow of "Armageddon."
(2007-07-17)

Tip of the Week
"Lights in the Dusk," the closing film of Aki Kaurismaki’s drolly dubbed "loser trilogy," follows Koistinen, a loner who’s been a night watchman for three years. He could go on this way forever, estranged from his equally glum co-workers. Janne Hyytiainen is dog perfect as the chain-smoking Koistinen, willing to drink alone. He's courtly but his cool knows its limits, as an ending as bracing as that of Kaurismaki’s brilliant "Match Factory Girl" rushes toward us
(2007-07-17)

Bombs Away
"Nice Bombs" is Chicago filmmaker Usama Alshaibi’s forceful diary-style documentary about the first visit he and his father and his American wife made a journey back to their native Iraq after the American occupation had begun
(2007-07-13)

iPhone Has a Home
Walking down Michigan Avenue, the crowd at Huron is motley, but up close to the Apple store, lines are roped off to east and south, security guards are parsing ten customers at a time: who gets to drop five, six hundred dollars in the pursuit of gadget-lust in the half hour to come?
(2007-07-10)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-10)

Well Enough in the Margins
(2007-07-10)

Bay Watching
(2007-07-02)

Tip of the Week
(2007-07-02)

More Moore
(2007-06-26)

Tip of the Week
(2007-06-26)

The Show Must Go On
(2007-06-26)

Limpid Pools
(2007-06-26)

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