Superbad, Mr. Bean’s Holiday, and The Simpsons Movie
by James Roland
Everyone needs a good laugh, except while they’re lifting weights. Then it’s fairly dangerous, especially when you break into a fit of suppressed laughter while you are raising 120 lbs over your chest.
To avoid such a scenario, do not watch Superbad the night before you work out. The latest endeavor from Apatow Productions (the team that brought The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and the under-appreciated television series Freaks and Geeks) belongs to a new breed of comedy. It mixes outlandishly crass language and scenarios with a sweet and gentle message of friendship, responsibility and the most tenuous of all subject matter, platonic man love. At its heart, Superbad is an endearing love note to high school and that last, glorious summer before college.
Mixing high craftsmanship with brash comedy seems a bit like sugar coating medicine. The secret code of the filmmakers seems to be, “make em learn, but make em like it.” The result is pure, defiled magic. Boob jokes and penis jokes far outnumber the precision-tuned character humor, but it is the detailed performances of Jonah Hill and Michael Cera the raise the film above the cinematic drudge of The Farrelly Brothers. This film cares. Vulgar characters have a depth and sorrow that keeps them from being two dimensional, and this allows the audience to laugh along with them rather than at them.
In the end, through all the drinking and shooting, drunken assaults, breast punching, and period blood stains (yes, you read that correctly) the film follows a thematic thread of growth and maturity. The two lead characters, along with a rag-tag team of brilliant side characters, learn how to be (or not be) Men, and find the consequences of either path.
While Superbad represents the cutting edge of comedy, splitting the sides of teenage boys while fulfilling the intellectual needs of film critics, Mr. Bean’s Holiday represents the archaic art of slapstick, situational comedy.
Rowan Atkinson stars as the innocently malevolent Mr. Bean, the extracted essence of The Three Stooges, The Keystone Cops, and Seinfeld’s Kramer. Practically mute and mildly retarded, it’s a wonder the Mr. Bean series has survived this long in the modern world. It seems that by now a conservative or liberal sub-group would be offended by his antics. Still, despite the ultimate failure of Mr. Bean’s Holiday to generate any substantial laughter, it’s nice to watch a genius at work. The film does not fail because of Rowan Atkinson’s brilliant physical comedy. It fails because of the medium.
While the British television show deserves worship in the upper pantheon of Farce, the Mr. Bean movies lose the raw, stage-like quality of the show. On the small screen, Mr. Bean’s gyrations and gross-out predicaments leave room for the audience’s imagination. When he blows his nose into a coat pocket, then tips the stretched fabric from side to side, it takes the viewers a few moments to piece together the predicament, and shudder with laughter as they imagine the slippery mucus teetering on the edge of the cloth. Meanwhile, the film takes the opposite approach, offering the audience the extreme close up of slippery raw oysters oozing around the pockets of a folded table cloth, ultimately landing in the purse of a female patron in a swanky French restaurant.
This kind of humor will still extract laughter from the kids, but will leave the young at heart tight lipped and stoic. In the end, Mr. Bean’s Holiday has a modicum of charm and mildly clever set-ups. The cameo of Willem Dafoe as a self-absorbed actor at the Cannes Film festival is particularly smile inducing. But over all, the film fails to capture the originality of the television series, which is worth purchasing on Amazon.com.
Reigning supreme over the other comedies currently at theaters, is the smart, snappy, and hilarious The Simpsons Movie. After 18 years on the air, The Simpsons has proven itself to be one of the best-written shows in history. It is continually funny and, despite a few slumps in its long career, is still original and heartfelt.
Needless to say, expectations for the film were higher than those of the liberal geeks who wrote the script. And like a champion in its prime, The Simpsons Movie is more than a valiant effort, it represents some of the best work of the series. Technically it is little more than a two hour episode. Some of the animation is grander, but it does not lean on big-screen gimmicks (i.e., the Simpson family does not find a magic book that brings them into the real world so we can see John Goodman do his best imitation of Homer).
The plot is standard: Homer screws up and endangers Springfield. But unlike the television show, Marge is not ready to forgive him, the problem is not easily solved, and there is a real sense that characters might leave, die, or be changed forever. This is not unheard of in the Simpson’s universe. A few years back, the writers killed off Ned Flander’s wife, leaving him a single father . . . a scenario they have not changed and still mine for comedic gold. But it’s amazing that, after 18 years of relatively little change, a Simpsons fan like myself can still wonder, “Is Homer going to die? No. No way . . . oh man I hope not.”
Then again, it’s those same 18 years of viewership that create such a strong bond between the audience and the characters. We’ve all invested so much good time in the Simpson family that, deep down, a part of us thinks of them as real.
Unlike some other cartoons, The Simpsons Movie does not sacrifice its characters and story for edgy satire; it depends on the tenets of good storytelling and a sharp wit to make it the finest comedy in recent memory.
