Simpsons Movie, The

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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? A plane?

Nope. It's super dome--a gigantic inverted bowl of impenetrable glass, lowered on top of the entire town of Springfield by the Environmental Protection Agency in order to contain the pollution.

You'd think with a nuclear power plant and lax rules for 18 years--"The Simpsons" debuted on FOX in December of 1989, after all--that the last straw for the environment would come from money-grubbing plant owner Monty Burns (voiced by Harry Shearer). Then again, when you have an employee who gleefully drops whatever radioactive particle he's working on when the end-of-day whistle blows, why wouldn't Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) be the one?

Though it was a long time coming, and, as Jason P. Vargo wrote in his theatrical review, "we've seen it all before," David Silverman ("Monsters Inc.," "The Road to El Dorado") does a nice job of bringing "The Simpsons" brand of silly, irreverent comedy to the big screen. When you have James L. Brooks and Matt Groening collaborating on the screenplay, though, you've usually got some pretty good material to work with.

I wouldn't rank this with the very best "Simpsons" episodes I've seen, but it's solid entertainment, with some real belly laughs and some memorable sequences.

Spider-Pig, Spider-Pig, Does whatever a Spider-Pig does.

That little ditty from composer Hans Zimmer rose to #3 on the charts in Ireland, no doubt helped by the image of Homer singing while he walks his pet pig on the ceiling. But it's not all silliness. I envision film students in future years talking about how ironic it is that Homer's act of kindness in rescuing a pig would drive Bart (Nancy Cartwright) into the welcoming, Christian arms of Ned Flanders (Shearer), and how appropriate it is for an animal that's become a metaphor for the dirtiest sort of behavior to have a role in the town's environmental downfall. Then there's the irony of Homer's laziness and sloppy repairs turning out to be the family's escape route after the townspeople take after Homer the way the peasants did Frankenstein.

If you think about it, there's a lot going on. But the headier "The Simpsons" gets, the farther away it gets from the all-out silliness that characterized some of the early episodes we got from creator Groening, who honed his satirical skills with a bunch of goofy rabbits in his "Life in Hell" syndicated college cartoon strip. The funniest bits are the ones you anticipate--like the Homer/Bart love/hate relationship reaching new heights when Homer tries to shake Bart from the TV antenna and hammer his pinkies so he falls off the roof, or daring Bart to skateboard naked through town. Dad of the year? Not even close. But it's those moments of character comedy that we have seen before that bring the most belly laughs. Even more than usual, "The Simpsons Movie" targets politics and politicians. There are no Bush-lovers to be found anywhere on Planet Simpson. Or any conservative-lovers, for that matter. In this film it's President Schwarzenegger, but his actions are obvious slams at the current president ("I was elected to lead, not to read."). The EPA takes a hit, and so do the oil companies.

My wife and I agonized whether to let our children see this one, and we didn't get much guidance from other reviews, so let me just say that except for several more extreme instances, what you get on "The Simpsons Movie" is what you've seen on the TV show. The exceptions? When Bart skateboards naked, you don't just see his little tushie. Just about the time you think that his genitals are going to be cleverly obscured in every sequence, that's when you see his little "junk." It's brief, it's quick, and it comes three-fourths of the way into his skateboarding stunt, but it's probably something parents ought to know about. Some might find it disturbing that little Ralph (Cartwright) says "I like men now" after seeing Bart, or that in another short sequence two cops kiss outside a motel before entering. Marge (Julie Kavner) says "God damn" near the end of the film, and Homer's solution to waste management is a silo that says "Pig Crap" on it. There's one other instance of language that's a bit zestier than the TV show, and Bart gets drunk when the family is on the lam and staying in a motel. Oh, and when Homer ends up in the Alaskan tribal equivalent to a sweat lodge and is tended to by a woman with large breasts, much is made of her top-heaviness. That's the collective parental alert.

To everyone's credit, this didn't feel like a half-hour episode that was stretched to the breaking point to fill 87 minutes. But over that span, and with a greater emphasis on plot, there wasn't the same frequency of LOL gags as in the best "Simpsons" episodes. But at least the plot was a clever satire . . . if, that is, you have a blue-state mentality.

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