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Director: David Silverman
Cast: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer
(Fox, 2007) Rated: PG-13
US DVD release date: 18 December 2007 (Fox)
by Jesse Hassenger At long last, after nearly two decades of waiting, it’s here. A cultural event long thought limited to the daydreams of diehard fans has finally seen the light of day: the DVD commentary track for The Simpsons Movie.

Oh, and the movie itself, which came out last summer, was fairly anticipated, too. But the pop-culture hype cycle has reached cruising speed, and last summer’s culmination of a two-decade buildup fades into the standard four-month, theater-to-home turnaround. The quick DVD rebirth of The Simpsons Movie, while absolutely standard, somehow feels a little sad, too—an admittance that this cultural event was as fleeting as any, a reminder that you rushed out and saw it on its first weekend, laughed a lot, and then it was all over.
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That’s where the commentary track comes in. Hardcore Simpsons nerds have learned to anticipate new DVD box sets even when they lack all-time favorite episodes simply because Matt Groening and company have set out to provide informative and funny commentary tracks for every single episode of the show ever produced (currently numbering somewhere in the 400s). The opportunity to hear an all-star (for the nerds, at least) round-up of Simpsons brain-trust members, including Groening and producer James L. Brooks, longtime writer-producers Al Jean and Mike Scully, and cast members Dan Castellaneta and Yeardley Smith, talk about the show’s first foray into theaters, then, will be the dominant interest for most fans.

They won’t be disappointed; though it was recorded, like many feature commentaries, prior to the film’s release (and Jean promises a future post-release commentary full of “finger-pointing and apologies”), the lack of hindsight is almost worth it for the fresh-off weariness we get instead. Fans will be especially happy to hear about earlier incarnations of the movie’s thousand or so gags—stuff that was tweaked, replaced, or outright scrapped during the script’s dozens upon dozens of rewrites—though they’ll also feel a little disappointed to find only some of those excised bits on the DVD’s collection of deleted scenes.

The endless writing process comes into broader play, too, when the crew discusses shaping the story of the film. One of the commentary’s best features is that the producers occasionally pause the film so they have time to elaborate on how and why they decided that the Simpsons would be leaving Springfield for Alaska, or the delicate balance of coarseness and sweetness that was apparently tipped more towards the former in earlier drafts.

Though the film does indeed harness a strong emotional core, none of the writers quite acknowledge that it is a story used in about a season’s worth of previous (and, presumably, future) Simpsons episodes, here writ extra-large: Homer loses Marge’s trust, putting their marriage in jeopardy until he can learn to be less selfish and win her back.

Even after all those episodes, this story works remarkably well in the film; it’s just hard not to think about how its impact would’ve been even greater ten or even five years ago. Jean’s note that this movie was intended to work just as well, if not better, for people who aren’t particularly familiar with the television show may be a tacit concession of the story’s familiarity, but that’s all we hear on the subject.

For the more technically inclined, there’s also an animators’ commentary in which the artists go into greater detail about the creation of the film’s strikingly, almost startlingly beautiful widescreen animation. The intentional simplicity of Groening’s original drawings have been polished, two decades later, into something downright stylish, and the movie benefits from the kind of animator attention twenty-two-minute episodes can’t afford.
Another additional DVD content mostly debris from the summer promotional blitz: Homer on the Tonight show, the American Idol family, and so forth; amusing, but more propaganda than tangents and fittings for, say, Will Ferrell or DVD Judd Apatow. In a brief deleted scenes add a few easy jokes, mostly in the center around Springfield in the origin of chaos after the prisoner in domed quarantine, but it is more familiar ground, as “The Simpsons always succeeded in entering society reference to a potential fire mob rule, but more epic proportions.

This is actually The Simpsons movie in a few words, it may be familiar, but it’s more and visually richer than what we are for, as well as funnier than many of the recent episodes of the show (though not as brilliant as any 90 — minutes from season three through eight). If, after a few months, he feels a bit anticlimactic, it is still remarkable that these characters can still make you believe it at all.

Director: Des McAnuff
Cast: Rene Russo, Robert De Niro, Jason Alexander, Piper Perabo, Randy Quaid, Kel Mitchell, Kenan Thompson, voices of June Foray and Keith Scott
(Universal, 2000) Rated: G
Moose and Squirrel

At one point during the endless-seeming shenanigans of The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Robert De Niro, embodying the cartoon character Fearless Leader, faces the camera, smirks, and utters a few familiar lines: “Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here….”

Would that he were. But no, as Fearless Leader, De Niro is surrounded by minions and in fact, speaking not to his mirror but to the most famous minions, Boris and Natasha via a video-cellphone. Outfitted with a monocle, cigarette holder, and prosthetic chin, De Niro gives an appropriately bloodless performance as this minor cartoon villain. And while this moment might conceivably evoke a sense of nostalgia or even in-jokey geniality, it’s more likely saddening to see the mordant cultural resonance of Travis Bickle has descended to cheap gaggery. Certainly, this joke or a similar one has come up before; Taxi Driver‘s signature psycho-line circulates freely in pop culture. And De Niro is a famous good sport about his own oversized image (for example, the psychotherapized gangster in Analyze This). But Fearless Leader — well, the trick is tired before it begins.However De Niro’s self-mimicry strikes you — and it’s likely that it won’t strike you at all if you’re the film’s ideal 10-year-old viewer — the humor in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle never develops beyond this puerile and rather retro level. This despite the fact that its first few minutes are all about its own datedness. A brief introduction recalls the TV series’ cancellation in 1964 as a momentous event equal to LBJ’s reelection or the New York World’s Fair, after which you see the resulting economic and spiritual decline of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s hometown, Frostbite Falls, Minnesota. According to the narrator (”voice mimic” Keith Scott, who also does Bullwinkle), this toontown has been “crippled by years of reruns,” to the point that he’s been reduced to “narrating the events of his own life,” demonstrated by a snarky play-by-play description of his mother basting a turkey.

Such wise-assness is short-lived, however, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle quickly devolves into a slow-moving save-the-free-world plot. Rocky and Bullwinkle are summoned by U.S. President (James Rebhorn), when Fearless Leader and his most famous minions, Boris and Natasha (fleshed out by Jason Alexander and Rene Russo) concoct a plot to zombify TV viewers with RBTV (Really Bad Television), transmitted from NYC. Um, yawn. Perhaps needless to say, the ex-George Castanza in half a mustache and black spy-hat doesn’t offer quite the same camp factor that the cel-animated Comrade Badenov did back in his heyday. This is partly because the original TV series’ Cold War humor doesn’t hold up, and partly because the script, attributed to Kenneth Lonergan, is lame times 12. The plot, such as it is, involves Boris and Natasha trying to destroy “Moose and Squirrel.” To this end, they run about in Keystone Cops-ish fast-motion, grouse and fall down some, and repeatedly exhibit their ineptitude with some cartoon-killer app called CDI (Computer Degenerating Imagery, or something like that). Meanwhile, the good guys dispatch FBI Agent Sympathy (Piper Perabo) to carry our heroes to New York in her Volkswagen bug because only they can stop Fearless Leader’s dastardly RBTV transmission.

During the ensuing road trip, you’re left with far too much time to wonder how this movie got made. It’s true that the original series was never quite squarely aimed at either children or adults, and might be understood in this way as a forward-thinking precursor for sassy shows like The Simpsons or King of the Hill. The film, however, remains boggled in a demo-neverland, appealing only to the very zombie audience it thinks it’s satirizing. Everyone knows it’s hard to act with blue screens, and the humans throughout this exercise appear baffled and disconcerted, especially compared to the much livelier Rocky and Bullwinkle, who inexplicably remain animated while everyone else turns into flesh-and-blood. While it’s obvious that up-and-comer Perabo signed up for the film because it is a) produced by De Niro’s once high-minded Tribeca Productions, and b) has a raft of Big Name Talent attached, including depressing appearances by Jonathan Winters, Janeane Garafolo, John Goodman, and the ever-hapless Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell.

Not to mention Whoopi Goldberg’s weak appearance as “Judge Cameo” in a courtroom scene, where Bullwinkle wears a white powdered wig and interrogates Agent Sympathy. It’s hard to know what to say about this particular embarrassment, except to note that, at least Goldberg didn’t produce the film, like someone else whose initials are Robert De Niro.

It may be that “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle to suffer from a kind of timewarp similar to the one that was beaten down Flintstounov two films, which is to say, that when something funny no longer.” Or perhaps that the film suffers from a very Standard film problems, tedious characters and situations, bad rate, lackluster direction (by Des McAnuff, once director whose first film was overheated costume drama Cousin Bette). Adventures But Rocky and Bullwinkle actually more misleading than conventional film such a list allows weak - . What may be most disturbing about The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle is that, like Howard with ducks or some such legendary Hollywood disaster, it is clearly negligent, and therefore deliberately turn a blind eye to his crimes.

This is even as the film offers a wide-winky look at how movies get made. To suck Rocky and Bullwinkle in three dimensions, the agent must penetrate Sympathy in the studio and many decked in LCD Tom Cruise-stealth together, the way to make it a “Green Light Tower. Here, the mystery of how inane and expensive projects are “greenlighted” the little joke, as you look Sympathy select multiple genres and throw a few high leverage to get that done. Such self-sometimes passes for understanding. In this case, however, is what it appears to be noise, and the impact that is not so much at all.

Review
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor