Movie review: The Simpsons Movie
So I attended the 12:01 showing of The Simpsons Movie because, well, I felt like being a part of something.
The AMC Theatre Oldsmar was packed -- a 500-seat sellout was in order, and the crowds ranged from parents with young kids to people my age, which is to say that it was all people my age or their kids. I was there early enough to secure a pretty decent seat, only to have the two seats next to me be occupied by an amazingly unattractive couple who spent the entire movie making out. Yes, they were making out during the Simpsons movie.
Anyway, I'd provide a better review of the movie except that it broke only a few minutes into the picture. It opens with the requisite Itchy & Scratchy picture, followed by an admonition of people who would pay money for something they can get on TV for free, and the lovely Lydian mode of Danny Elfman's "Simpsons Theme" which elicited a roar of applause from the crowd. A cameo by Green Day started the picture proper, and then the screen went black and the theatre lights came up.
Another roar ensued, this one of boos. The screen remained black and I started singing, loudly,
"DON'T STOPPPPPPPPP BELIEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIN'"
That got a laugh out of a lot of people. Fifteen minutes later, a full-scale riot was underway, with numerous red-hots being tossed at the screen, screaming, cursing, and lots of craning around backward to look at the projectionist's booth. Here I quote Duane Decker's 1947 book Good Field, No Hit (for the second time on this blog) where he speaks about hecklers at a baseball game:
They crane their necks to look for the heckler. They never see anything, but they always crane their necks.
Alas, there was nothing to see, and no usher or manager came out to explain what was happening to the crowd. After about twenty minutes the film resumed, to applause, though about 30 seconds past where the film had broke (and after what appeared to be the setup to a fairly large joke) leading the makeout couple next to me to yell, "rewind it!" and I turned to them and said "it's not a videotape, you can't rewind it" and I'd have said more except I realized the film was much quieter than when it had started, and this is a problem for comedy films, because the laughter covered up a lot of the lines of the film from this point on.
I was reminded of this moment from the series (click through if your RSS reader doesn't show YouTube clips:
So as far as I could tell, The Simpsons Movie was very funny, but I missed a lot of it for the aforementioned reasons, and I encourage you to see it, just make sure the theatre is loud and/or empty.
