“Why should we pay to see something we can get at home for free?”
–Homer Simpson
I’m not sure on the why, exactly, but the fact is that lots of people are doing just that. If any movie has a chance of catching Harry Potter’s record before the prices go up again, it’s this one. I don’t have any information on the actual dollars being spent, but imdb.com users have already voted it up to the #43 spot by viewer rankings. It’s beating M, Alien, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it’s only going to go up, I’m guessing.
And it is a pretty good movie, but it really shouldn’t be ranked ahead of Strangers on a Train or Notorious. There’s really not much that should be ranked ahead of Notorious as far as I’m concerned. But it really is a lot like watching an episode of the show, if the episodes lasted 87 minutes, and a good episode of the show besides. Bart is at his bad-boy best, Lisa plays the sax and falls in love with a junior environmental activist, Marge worries and warns and is ignored, and Maggie sucks on her little nuk and quietly saves the day. Oh, and of course Homer screws up a lot. That’s a given.
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| The Flying Simpsons premiere their daring new high-wire act. |
This time he screws up by polluting Lake Springfield (which the town has just cleaned up at great effort) beyond salvaging when he dumps a silo full of manure into it. The EPA (the head of which reports to President Schwarzenegger — I don’t know if he’s president on TV, but I liked that touch), realizing that the place is now basically a toxic waste dump, decides to solve the problem through isolation, and drops a huge glass dome over the conveniently perfectly circular town.
It just gets wilder from there.
The EPA goes to greater and greater lengths to keep this ecological disaster quiet, the Simpson clan ends up in Alaska, Bart is almost turned into a Flanders, Homer fights a wrecking ball (guess who wins?), and Tom Hanks shows up. Everything’s so rapid-fire I could tell you just about everything I remember happening and there’d still be an awful lot of new stuff for you to see. I’m not enough of a fan of the show to be sure, but I’m guessing that every character that you ever saw on TV is here and then some. And Moe gets to be Emperor of Springfield, at least for a little while.
I’m giving this four idols. If you like the show at all, you’ll like this movie, which is really just the show multiplied by itself a few times for the big screen. They do sort of refer to themselves a lot — like Homer’s comment quoted above — which I don’t really care for, but apparently that’s just become part of the show over the years. And the music is bad, but at least it’s meant to be. Except now I have “Spider Pig” stuck in my head. Don’t ask, just go see the movie. Everybody else is…