The Simpsons Movie Redux

So now for a proper review of it after my slovenly attempt after having seen it at the pictures. This is a review of the DVD as a whole as there are many interesting little things in there.

Shameless cash in vid:



See it's tie-in crap like that that ruins movies. Oh, and here's my "Simpsonized" version:

That's the power of advertising for you!

The cash ins. The test audiences. Many people have complained about The Simpsons Movie and if you want to find what went wrong those are two things that spring to mind after listening to the DVD commentary. It's a movie designed for the casual fans, the sort of people who eat Burger King because The Simpsons told them to or sit in test audiences.

Ah, the test audiences. They caused that awful original version of Blade Runner. They cocked up MST3K: The Movie, depriving us of seeing the finest scene in it. Time and again during the commentaries on The Simpsons Movie DVD the writers and directors talk about alternate scenes and lines cut from the film because they didn't play well with the test audiences. The problem is that many of ideas sound hilarious. But ah well, at least with a shiny disc that can contain hunners o stuff we'll get to see all of those bits cut out. Nope. The disc seems to have been created for the same casual fans, and as such there are only about five minutes of scenes, the only one that's good being when Homer gets a lift back to Springfield in the back of a sausage truck. The joke's obvious but thanks to Hank Azaria it's hilarious. The disc is exceptionally light given the usual bundles of extras found on The Simpsons season sets. Like someone who would sit in a test audience would watch deleted scenes anyway. The stuff that was animated should have been put on there. Too many concessions were already made during the film (President Schwarzenegger instead of Wolfcastle anyone?).

But what of the actual film as it stands. From what I've already written it sounds like I hated it. That is untrue. I've now seen it three times and have found myself in hysterics each and every time. The simple fact is that the film is brilliantly funny. It's also tightly scripted with pretty much every seemingly throwaway joke coming back to prove it's worth with a payoff, such as pretty much every incident in the first twenty minutes. Many have complained about the fact that the actual is taken away from Springfield, but this is a movie and so the script needed something bigger. Nobody complained when South Park descended into Armageddon being brought on by a war between Canada and the USA.

Yes it has its faults, most characters are barely seen even though the incidental are just important to The Simpsons success as the eponymous family, and too much sway was given to the test audiences and the people who won't get the Springfield Gorge crashed ambulance joke. But at the end of it all it's a very good, very funny movie and it appears that a lot of the backlash against it has come from people who have been waiting nineteen years for this. With that sort of build up there was no way it could live up to those expectations.