Tonight I saw The Simpsons Movie at an advanced screening in Dallas. Supergenius also saw a screening in Seattle. Rather than post dueling reviews, we thought we would post a dialog, Siskel-And-Ebert style. What follows is a transcript of our discussion of the movie.

BTD Greg: Do we need to set up the premise? I mean, everyone knows what “The Simpsons” is about, right? They are iconic. Maybe it’s worth mentioning that there’s really nothing special going on with the movie–it’s basically just like what you expect from a television episode, but longer.

Supergenius: Agreed. If this were a report card, it would say “meets expectations, but is not living up to full potential.” Instead, it seems a rehash of recurring themes over the past few years: rock band cameos, making fun of various demographics, and Homer doing crazy stuff.

BTD Greg: I agree completely. I will admit that I laughed out loud several times, but there were many other times that I thought, “They’ve done this exact same gag before, only funnier.”

Supergenius: Absolutely. Albert Brooks in particular, who is the biggest guest voice in the movie, is nowhere near as funny here as he was, say, as Hank Scorpio. That said, it’s still a pretty funny movie. It’s like complaining because you ordered a Big Mac and you got… a Big Mac. Expectations here got out of whack.

BTD Greg: There’s a moment at the very beginning of the movie where the audience is watching an “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoon, and Homer stands up, MST-3000 style and says, “I don’t want to pay for something that I can watch every week for free,” then turns to the audience and says, “suckers!”

Supergenius: Yes. A genius moment.

BTD Greg: I found this distracting because I spent the rest of the movie wondering whether Homer was right.

Supergenius: The film is very self-aware in that respect.

BTD Greg: The crowd I watched it with absolutely loved it. I think this was a combination of most of them being very hard-core Simpsons fans and the fact that none of they paid to get in. Nonetheless–it appears to be a definite crowd pleaser.

Supergenius: There’s another scene where all of a sudden a scrolling ticker appears at the bottom of the screen containing an ad for a Fox show, with a notation to the effect that “we even advertise during movies now.” People were gasping for air — and it’s not even that funny a joke. I think the crowds will come out and have a great time, even if (as Homer says) they’re suckers.

BTD Greg: I thought that particular bit was lame, but yeah, people at my theater laughed too. The animation was somewhat upgraded for the feature motion picture — but who watches “The Simpsons” for the animation (with all due respect to Mr. Groening.”

Supergenius: You know, visually this was a very different movie. It looked and felt more like Futurama. That’s not a bad thing; but the semi-3D effects were a bit distracting at times.

BTD Greg: If you want to get technical, the sound editing was excellent. (Really.)
And did you notice the Hans Zimmer score? It’s kind of too bad they didn’t get Danny Elfman.

Supergenius: The whole point of the Simpsons is that no one is supposed to be paying attention to things like animation and sound. We’re supposed to be laughing our asses off.

BTD Greg: Very true. To be perfectly frank, although the movie is consistently enjoyable, I probably laughed more times during a season 2 or 3 half-hour episode.

Supergenius: Oh, absolutely. Frankly, I wished they had anything in here up to that level. A musical number would have been welcome, like the ‘Monorail’ song.

BTD Greg: I think the movie also pretty much squandered its PG-13 rating. A few obscenities and some very brief (but disturbing) Bart frontal nudity.

Supergenius: Instead, I saw a number of jokes they’d used several times. Homer on a vision quest? Mr. Burns releasing the hounds? Old hat.

BTD Greg: Yeah…didn’t they also do a couple of episodes with Bart interacting with the Flanderses?

Supergenius: That episode was great — all the kids were nearly baptized — remember, Homer dove into the baptismal water at the last second, sparing Bart. At the same time, this episode — er, movie — was far more political than I’m used to from the Simpsons. It was oddly very obvious in its environmentalist message, along with a large secularist (borderline antireligious) bent and clear anti-red state politics. Maybe I was just dreaming all that, but I’m used to the Simpsons getting their political messages across in a far more subtle way.

BTD Greg: Huh. I’m probably more of a red-stater than you are, and it didn’t really bother me much. Heck, the head of the EPA is the villain here, so it can’t be all that liberal. Then again, any political message in this movie was pretty hackneyed, so it’s not that big of a deal.

My one other issue with the movie (other than it not being as funny as it could/should have been) was that they seemed hell bent on squeezing every single Springfield character they could into the movie, but none were really given any quality screen time other than the immediate Simpsons family and maybe Ned Flanders.

Supergenius: Fair enough. I can tell you that the Seattle crowd went nuts during the movie — Seattle is the only real-world city (besides D.C.) to be featured. As for the character cameos, I was also disappointed. Waaaaay too much Flanders. Too much Cletus, for that matter. No good lines from Apu, nothing from Principal Skinner — it was pretty sad. Then again, how on earth would you satisfy the fanboys with as many characters as they have? There were too many scenes of character after character just standing there with the camera zooming past, while the character did nothing at all. At least Bumblebee Man got his due, I suppose.

BTD Greg: So what’s your overall assessment, SG?

Supergenius: I dunno. It was as good as your average recent-vintage episode of The Simpsons, only longer. If we’re using stars, maybe 3/5. If thumbs, it’s a thumbs up, but not super-enthusiastically. There’s nothing here remotely as wonderful as “the goggles, they do nothing!” You?

BTD Greg: I agree. I’ll go for the letter grades and give it a solid B. Simpsons fans will love it. The crowd in my theater ate it up. I’d give it a “thumbs up” too, but I also think it was immediately forgettable, and no better than watching a few random Simpsons reruns.