jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Just in case you somehow managed to avoid the longest-running TV sitcom in American history, do not worry: The Simpsons Movie is careful to include everybody in the fun. In the opening minutes, after Itchy and Scratchy have landed on the moon and everybody in the audience has been declared “a sucker” for paying good money to see what you can get for free on TV, the script introduces every character fresh.

Here’s Homer, the oaf, and Marge with the blue beehive. Earnest adolescent Lisa has a new cause and a new crush, baby Maggie knows how to fend for herself, and Bart–well, Bart should need as little introduction as the “evil corporate mascot” he impersonates with a black bra on his head. In the process, some of the essence that has gotten away from the characters over the years is restored: Lisa playing her saxophone, Bart riding his skateboard through town naked, Homer equal parts stupid, selfish and compassionate with a pet pig that rates its own theme song. Call it “Homer Begins,” call it “Casino Springfield”–you’re not required to know anything about the extended cosmology of the Simpsons to enjoy their movie.

But it helps. As far as I could tell, The Simpsons Movie is stuffed with enough in-jokes and references to past episodes to keep a dozen Internet forums humming for months.The supporting cast seems to include every character who’s ever appeared on the show, and many of them have lines. The animation–the familiar vast fields of flat, juicy color bounded by satisfyingly thick black lines–looks great on a movie screen. For this fair-weather fan, the laughter started during the studio logo (!) and didn’t end until far into the credits. (Make sure to stay for Maggie’s first word.)

The plot? Like most things Simpsons, it loses in the telling, so let’s just say that it’s appropriately large-scale for the movies, and each of the principal characters is tested to the breaking point — as it should be. Beyond that, it’s worth noting that the movie’s villain is the American government. Ruled by a president who’d rather “lead than read,” Springfield finds itself at the mercy of a corrupt official (voice of Albert Brooks) whose response to a natural disaster is even worse than FEMA’s. Clearly, somebody in the Simpson White House doesn’t care about yellow people.

Does The Simpsons Movie achieve the lofty heights of brilliance the show regularly scaled during its mid-nineties heyday? More than just the longest episode, is it also the Best. Episode. Ever? I’m pretty sure it’s not, and I don’t think it could have been. Try as they might, The Simpsons simply aren’t as vital now as they were during the Clinton years, when their whiplash wit, easygoing snarkiness, and compulsive pop referencing influenced an entire generation’s sense of humor. If anything, The Simpsons succeeded so completely that they faded into the fabric of our culture, and going to Springfield for an hour and a half feels a little bit like going home. No matter where you’ve been for the last 18 years, these are some very familiar characters with very familiar voices. Seeing them up on the big screen, it’s like we knew all along they had it in them to become movie stars.

The Simpsons Movie. David Silverman, 2007. ****

Here’s the beginning of Marcy’s review, with a few heavy-handed edits from yours truly.

It’s a very special version of hell: fill an office suite with qualified executives, lock them in, and have them duke it out for a top job. Request they fill out duplicate forms, subject them to twisted mind games, offer food that has gone bad… and see how far they’re willing to go. Far below the corporate windows, G8 protests are raging in the streets of Madrid, but it’s going to get even uglier inside. That’s the premise of The Method, Marcelo Piñeyro’s unique, Survivor-in-a-boardroom contribution to the suddenly popular genre of the biting office satire.

El Método. Marcelo Piñeyro, 2005. ***

• More from Matt Zoller Seitz and James van Maanen.

Yet another Tribeca dud, Taxidermia is one of the most unpleasant movies I’ve ever sat through. György Pálfi (Hukkle) directed this Hungarian Grand Guignol grotesquery that riffs on exactly three ideas: pig fucking, speed eating, and self-taxidermy. Based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy, the movie presents the fable-like history of a freakish family. In the first section, a harelipped country pervert who can shoot fire from his dick is looking for ever-new kicks in well-lubricated glory holes and Hans Christian Andersen tales that turn into their porno versions. Imaginative camera work and extreme close-ups create an intense physicality, but they don’t lead to a place you want to follow: by the end of the segment, butchery, adultery, and shocking acts of bestiality and necrophilia sent waves of nervous giggles through the audience. The walk-outs started.

The remainder of the movie tells the stories of the pig-fucking pervert’s offspring. His son, born with a curly tail (ha ha!), becomes one of the Eastern Bloc’s most successful “sport eaters,” an obese guy in a wrestling leotard wolfing down chunky soups and Russian horse sausage from troughs. Between rounds, the competitors power-barf and chat about the groupies in the audience. Like an SNL sketch that stretches its conceit well past the breaking point, Taxidermia milks the “sport eating” joke for more than its worth: there’s the cross-swallow, the hollowed out red star filled with caviar, the threat of lock jaw. It’s as if Pálfi had decided to take the “mint leaf” sequence from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and turn it into a feature film. There seems to be some satirical intent, but it’s not pointed enough to sting.

The third section is the most repulsive: close-ups of taxidermy in progress were never on my must-see list, and the skinning, gutting, and sawing is made worse by the fact that the pervert’s ghoulish grandson is operating on himself. And I haven’t even told you about the gutted fetus, to be filed under “sights that cannot be unseen.” Not every movie has to be a pleasant experience, but Taxidermia struck me as a pointless gross-out, inventive but without sufficient character or story to support its grotesque excesses.

Taxidermia. György Pálfi, 2006. *

• Filmbrain finds Taxidermia “a fascinating treatise on excess, desire, and the politics of the body.”
• The trailer:

More amusing silliness from the guys who made Shaun of the Dead. After demolishing the zombie film, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost are taking aim at the Jerry Bruckheimer action flick, and they’ve set it in the picture-postcard English countryside. Bobbies with firearms–what’s not to like?

Simon Pegg plays Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a London supercop who is sent off to the provinces because he’s making everybody else on his team look bad. In sleepy Sandford, the only available heroics consist of chasing underage kids out of the pub and catching runaway swans. Angel’s new partner PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) is an action-movie fanatic whose dearest wish is to fire a gun while jumping through the air in slow motion. But ah, evil lurks in Sandford, and Danny might get his wish after all….

It takes a while for Hot Fuzz to ramp up the action, but in the meantime, the spectacular supporting cast keeps things very entertaining: Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Bill Nighy, and a slew of other familiar faces populate the town with characters that range from oddly endearing to cheerfully creepy. My patented scientific method for objectively judging comedy reveals a favorable chuckle-to-groan ratio, one dozen solid out-and-out laughs, four roll-out-of-your-seat moments of uncontrollable hilarity, and a steady state of hearty bemusement. For a 120 minute film, that’s not bad at all. Hot Fuzz opens on April 20th.

Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright, 2007. ***

• The trailer

The second time around, Borat isn’t quite as hilariously shocking, but its knotty complexities only grow deeper. When you’re not busy rolling in the aisles, you’ll actually notice that some of Sacha Baron Cohen’s victims hold on to their dignity rather well. Certain jokes are such self-reflexive boomerangs that you have to hear them more than once to figure out exactly who the target is (like the one that goes “You telling me the man who try to put a rubber fist in my anus was a homosexual?“) Others have been quoted in outrage so much that the actual punchline went forgotten: the “Running of the Jews” bit doesn’t actually pay off until the last scene of the movie, where Borat says, “It’s cruel. We Christians now!” while a crucified townsperson gets poked with a pitchfork. Questions about what’s real persist–I’m not sure who said it first, but the line about all movies being documentaries applies.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Larry Charles, 2006. ****

• YouTube pulled it, but Yahoo Video still has Sacha Baron Cohen’s Golden Globe acceptance speech.

On second viewing, Bong Joon-ho’s upcoming monster smash hit is still a thrill, and it also reveals just how exquisitely crafted it is. The cinematography is outstanding, and the film is stuffed with oddball humor and details that resonate and multiply, giving the characters real life above and beyond the necessities of mutant fodder. There’s also a sly political sensibility at work — who has ever seen such an enthusiastic celebration of the molotov cocktail?

There’s talk about a Hollywood remake, but that’s just ridiculous. The Host is itself imported from any number of American horror films, overlaid with a peculiar South Korean auteur’s preoccupations. To remake it in this country would be as idiotic as remaking A bout de souffle (which, of course, they did.) What makes The Host so special is the way Bong quotes and twists genre cliches and adds a thousand small touches: a hero who has coins stuck to his face when we first meet him, lazy-eyed scientists, the moment’s wait before the ramen is cooked, van jokes that outdo anything in Little Miss Sunshine, an 11th-hour speech about the lack of protein, a disposable fisherman who worries about his daughter’s plastic cup, untrustworthy salarymen who fret about taxation on reward monies, the finale of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest replayed as farce, and a terrificly slippery, tentacled monster with an endless supply of surprise moves. The Host is full of specificity and character, but also satisfies (almost) all of our genre expectations. A hell of a lot of fun. Now scheduled to open on March 9. I have some footage from the NYFF press conference with Bong that I may finally put on YouTube….

Gwoemul. Bong Joon-ho, 2006. *****

• Previously on muckworld

Here’s the trailer, which doesn’t really do it justice:

There’s no doubt in my mind that Sacha Baron Cohen’s outrageous comedy is going to be huge–he had a Wednesday afternoon crowd of New York’s finest critics howling for 90 minutes straight. The humor’s as broad and silly as anything Will Ferrell has done, but it feels much more dangerous and true. As Borat travels west across the country with his bear and his ice cream van, he doesn’t just reveal his own stupidity but also that of everybody he encounters. Frat boys, dinner parties in Southern mansions, Trump Tower, a Virginia rodeo, an antique shop, Pamela Anderson–nothing’s safe from Cohen’s sophisticated satire, disguised as backwater idiocy. It’s not often that we walk out of a comedy hurting with laughter and wanting to go back to see it again as soon as possible. There’s a lot more I want to tell you, but I’d just be spoiling the jokes. Very nice. Opens November 3rd.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Larry Charles, 2006. ****

• Watch the first four minutes of Borat online

[tags]borat, comedy, 4 stars, kazakhstan, america, sacha baron cohen, satire, pamela anderson, bears, hand party[/tags]

Yes, yes, yes! Bong Joon-ho’s record-breaking monster movie strikes a perfect balance between broad social satire, oddball comedy, and honest-to-god horror thrills. Thanks to Americans who blithely pollute the Han river, an amphibious mutant creature with fearsome mandibles and a prehensile tail haunts the sewers of Seoul. The creature is designed by Weta, but the family that has to fight it–along with backstabbing salarymen and untrustworthy government agencies–is 100% Korean, a bunch of ramen-selling “losers” (Bong) who are prone to screwing up just when it matters most. In Bong’s hands, stock scenes, like the character-building moments of respite between monster attacks, turn into little gems of droll humor and genuine sadness. The plot doesn’t follow Hollywood conventions, and the biohazard setup allows all sorts of swipes at SARS and American hubris, including a few stabs at the Iraq war. It’s all shot beautifully, and some of Bong’s directorial flourishes made me want to pump my fist and shout “yeah!” Tentative release date is January 29, 2007.

The Host. Bong Joon-ho, 2006. ****

[tags]film, 4 stars, horror, monster, korea, bong joon-ho, nyff, seoul, sewers, satire[/tags]