"I'll teach you to laugh at something that's funny!"

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2007)

There's been maybe too much hype about this movie, though at the same time it did affect me in the way it was intended for die-hard fans (e.g. all the time this past week I kept thinking "ah, Simpsons movie" as I re-watched episodes from past seasons on DVD), and the anticipation almost became boring after so long a wait. The question then comes, was it worth it? For all of the ultra (and mostly kidding) hype and ultra promotion and the almost decades-long wait for some people? Absolutely. It delivers, at the least, a good time for those who may even just watch the show casually, and have even scoffed it off after years of shows that have spurned off from it like Family Guy. It's a reboot, if one can imagine, for those that think the show has gone too slack for the audience. But since it's an institution at this point, one of the longest running shows in the history of TV, what would one expect?
It also has what the fans want, even if it's in the smallest things like seeing Homer acting like the classic idiot that he is (and with a pig no less, going from Spider-Pig to Harry Plopper. in a single bound) or Bart acting like a proto Dennis the Menace skating through town without his clothes on (d'oh, spoiler). But it's also- as more than a few fans and observers have said- like one long episode of the series...which can be said about most animated TV-show-to-movie transitions (with the exception of South Park). Its plot is not too untypical for a Simpsons episode: Homer does something dumb, the town is in jeopardy, and only he and the rest of the family (more or less) can come to the rescue. It is a fairly simply plot, but then again, why carp? If the writers tried to shoot for the moon with something too ambitious- or, actually, more-so than I actually expected- they could've fallen flat on their faces. It's this level of quasi-simplicity that allows them to go for jokes that might not get on regular TV (this includes, to be sure, jabs at the 'crawl' at the bottom of a TV screen, and the old "to be continued" gag).
But this being said, as an extended episode, it's one of the best episodes ever made! Praise enough? What does a great episode have anyway? What about a great movie? There's a sincere attempt to just go for broke in terms of tackling all kinds of comedy: subtle and biting satire on current events (environmental mishaps, governmental s***-headedness and evil-doing, Tom Hanks), "scatalogical" humor, chiefly in the MacGuffin that triggers the rest of the plot (that's a good pig); total zaniness (want to see Homer split into a dozen pieces as he has to come to an epiphany while stretched to Dali degrees?); and subtle-to-obvious jabs at religion, family, alcoholism, Green Day, and of course the Hollywood summer blockbuster itself. Where else will one see a bomb-detonator robot shooting itself in the head over the pressure?
The gags come at ten-to-twenty second clips much of the time, and it even has (gasp) some of the heartfelt moments from early on in the series, surrounded by jokes that still can hit best with a packed audience. It is, simply put, a true crowd-pleaser, one of the best in recent memory, and definitely aside from Grindhouse THE movie so far this year I will want to watch again and again. Woo-hoo!