The Simpsons Movie

When you've been waiting for a movie for over 10 years, it's hard to really be objective about it. Especially when the series has been in a decline for so many seasons. But I'd say they really did right by The Simpsons when converting it into a big screen adventure, and the results are better than I expected.

A lot of old writers from the glory days of the show returned to work on the movie, and it definitely shows. The first half of the movie is as comical as some of the better episodes. Homer's manner of disposing of a hornet's nest, and his reaction to Bart almost falling off the roof, are classic bits sure to earn laughs. And of course there's Spider-Pig, something I'm particularly fond of. The majority of worthwhile characters from the Simpsons universe make funny, albeit brief, cameos, and the first half hour or so is just spent coasting from one laugh to the next. There are a couple good jokes on the nature of making a movie out of a TV show, and one really good jab that pokes fun at the very studio funding them.

The Simpsons formula has always been pretty familiar - the first act appears totally random and offers many jokes, and then somehow meanders into whatever the main issue is by the second act. Then there's some kind of major dilemma, and finally all is resolved in some unorthodox way in the final act. That's preserved here fairly well, just stretched a bit to fit the new hour and a half format. In some ways, the movie is just like a really long TV episode - but honestly, it's a pretty damn good episode so I don't mind. Not everything can be the South Park movie, and I honestly didn't expect it to be anything like that.

The film slows down a bit towards the end, and you have the usual thematic hokeyness - love conquers all, we're nothing without our friends, blah blah blah, the usual - but it stays consistently entertaining and restores the status quo in a (semi) plausible manner. Overall, I enjoyed my movie-going experience. This isn't a redefining of The Simpsons, but it's another solid chapter in a very long career that was starting to look like it had run out of steam.