MOVIE : The Simpsons, Bigger and Better

The Simpsons, Bigger and Better


In episode 607 of South Park, Butters, in his guise as Professor Chaos, dreams up a host of insidious schemes—blocking out the sun, decapitating a South Park statue, selling the town a monorail—only to be told that these had already been spun out on a certain animated TV series. "How come every time I think of something clever," Butters asks, "The Simpsons already did it?"


The episode was a tribute from one cadre of cartoon geniuses—South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone—to another, earlier one: Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and their team of highly educated misfits, who developed Groening's crudely drawn one-minute Tracey Ullman Show vignettes of a chinless yellow family into a half-hour sitcom, nay, a veritable comedy cosmos that this fall begins its record-breaking 19th season on Fox.

Once they had produced 400 shows and run a zillion variations on Homer's Brobdingnagian stupidity, Marge's slow burn, Bart's overachieving impishness, Lisa's displaced intelligence and Maggie's muteness, The Simpsons' caretakers faced another challenge. How could they expand 22 min. of content into a coherent, cholerically funny, 87-min., worth-paying-for laff riot shown on a wall in a mall? And beyond how—why? Maybe because Parker and Stone had proved it could be done, splendidly, with their 1999 South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Anyway, here's The Simpsons Movie. It was worth waiting for.

In an ecologically threatened Springfield, Homer fouls the local lake with the refuse of a pig he's fallen in love with. The place is declared a disaster area, and an evil government bureaucrat orders that the town be domed. Having alienated everyone with his idiocy, Homer must prove himself a hero: "Risking my life—to save people I hate—for reasons I don't really understand."

The film, written by 11 guys, and directed by David Silverman in the old-fashioned, hand-drawn way, looks surprisingly spiffy on the big screen. It's rated PG-13 (for brief frontal nudity), but vulgarity was never the envelope The Simpsons pushed. Its goal was density, comic congestion, the vacuum-packing of cool gags and grotesque-sympathetic characters into the shortest span possible.

The little miracle of the movie is that this plays out at four times the length without giving you a headache. The film finds its own pace, and it keeps its personality. It doesn't try to be ruder or kinkier, just bigger and better. It follows a rule Brooks laid down at the beginning of the series: Don't be afraid to show emotion. Audience, that goes for you too when you watch Homer and Marge's worst ever marital crisis. Sob away unabashedly.
So, for those of you who were wondering if a great TV show could top itself at feature-film length, the good news is that The Simpsons did it! But South Park did it first.








Source : http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1647331,00.html

Potter Marks a Generation of Readers

Potter Marks a Generation of Readers

They were just learning to instant-message their friends when Harry Potter got his first owl from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

As they were using their freshly minted licenses to drive to school — stopping for that status-symbol Frappuccino on the way — Harry was meeting his estranged godfather Sirius Black.

When they were already stalking old boyfriends and girlfriends through MySpace and Facebook, Harry was getting his first kiss, battling evil wizards and discovering a prophecy about his future.

And in a few days, a generation of children who grew up with the Harry Potter series will learn the fate author J.K. Rowling has for the boy wizard who was with them through it all.

Makenzie Greenblatt, a 20-year-old student at the University of Washington, began reading Harry Potter in 1999 when she received the first book in the series for Chanukah. Back then, people barely knew the significance of a lightening shaped scar when her friend's little brother dressed up as the boy who lived for Halloween. Now the cultural boom is inescapable.

"It's been weird to watch the phenomenon of it spread and to see how big it's become," Greenblatt said, dressed in a witches hat, cape and Harry Potter shirt at the recent midnight premiere of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" in Seattle.

In the past decade, Greenblatt and her peers hoarded every word of Rowling's unfolding series for the past decade. Now they're in college or at their first jobs, but their love of the wizarding world has not abated.

"Harry Potter is part of a shared cultural heritage. It serves as a touchstone for their experience that they can look back on, and binds them as a group culturally and generationally," said Philip Nel, an associate professor of English Kansas State University who teaches a course on Harry Potter and wrote "J.K.

Rowling's Harry Potter Novels: A Reader's Guide."

Meeting someone who hasn't read the books, or at least watched a movie is weird for Terra Morgan, a 21-year-old University of Washington student who sat next to Greenblatt at the movie, wearing a Gryffindor-style gold and crimson striped scarf. For Morgan, Harry Potter is more than a book series.

"It's social more than anything else because everyone knows about it," Morgan said.

In fact, Morgan and Greenblatt met while creating a Harry Potter style competition for the drama department at the University of Washington.

After the sixth book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince," came out two years ago, Matt Hungerford, a 19-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spent a week discussing plot nuances with his friends.

"I think in five or 10 years when people look back it will definitely be something people remember," Hungerford said. "I can't think of any other books that have captured more attention than this."

For Sarah Harper, a 19-year-old student at Centenary College of Louisiana, reading the series through her adolescence was like growing up with Harry.

"At 15 his experiences were very similar to my experiences in a weird way. Except I wasn't fighting evil wizards all the time," Harper said.

Many readers feel a similar connection, said Nancy Pearl, author of "Book Lust."

"One of the things for people who did come of age as Harry came of age is that the increased complexity of the books made it worth their while to keep reading," Pearl said.

She compared the Harry Potter books to other cultural milestones, such as "Star Wars" in the 1970s.

"It's as much a cultural icon as cell phones and the Internet," Pearl said.

As the hours countdown to midnight Saturday, members of the Potter generation are preparing for the end of a decade-long affair.

Some plan to reread the series. Caroline Reaves, a 19-year-old student at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, sped through all 885,943 words of the first six books in 24 hours to prepare for book seven. She said she might slow down her reading speed to savor the last book.

Emerson Spartz, creator of the popular Potter site Mugglenet.com, said the last pages of the books would be bittersweet.

"Each page is going to be like a death clock counting down," Spartz said.

After the last page is turned, what do Potterphiles do next?

"We read them again, and again, and again," Greenblatt said.


Source : http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=269364