I love watching The Simpsons and have been an ardent follower (used to be anyway) of the cartoon series ever since it debuted as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. Besides spoofing movies, the dysfuntional family also pokes fun and parodies the American culture and society.
I watched the movie twice….yeah you read right….TWICE…in the cinema too. *Guffaw* Well, both times free too so that’s like no additional costs incurred….hehehehe. Caught the preview on Tues and another time yesterday night. The movie is really funny and is geared towards the adult audience rather than kids. It’s a tad violent and ribald for kids viewing but I still see some families stringing their young ones along. Oh well….
The core of the movies deals with pollution and the environment. Homer adopts a pig which he nick-named Spider Pig/Harry Plopper after it was ordered to be slaughtered by Krusty the clown after his ad wraps up. Homer dumps the pigs waste in a silo to the contaminated Springfiled lake leading to mutation of a squirrel. The squirrel was captured by EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and was produced in front of President Schwarzenegger by Russ Cargill, head of EPA. Drastic actions followed with Springfield being quarantined under a dome and wiped out from the map.
The Simpsons was forced to relocate to Alaska when the townspeople found out HOmer was the culprit who dumped the waste into the lake. Meanwhile, Russ manipulated the President into destroying Springfield and replacating a new Grand Canyon in its place with Tom Hanks promoting the ad.
The movie is enjoyable and really hilarious. I especially love the part where Homer sings the song “Spider Pig” while walking the pig upside down on the ceiling! The song comes in again when HOmer was having his epiphany…..what a riot! Watch the trailer here.
Hanna doubles up as a phone sex operator for side income. One day, the untalented singer, Ammy played a joke on her during Sang-Jun’s birthday celebrations. Hanna was broken-hearted when she overheard Sang-Jun telling Ammy that she was just a pawn in their game and that he wouldn’t like someone so fat and ugly. Hanna tried commiting suicide unsuccessfully, saved by a phone call from her phone sex client. It turned out that her client was a famous plastic surgeon, whom she tried blackmailing into performing plastic surgery on her body entirely, from top to toe! 
After a year of convalescing in the hospital, Hanna ‘unveiled’ into a beautiful girl. She soon discovered that pretty girls get royal treatment wherever they go and can even get away with murder possibly. Sang-Jun was holding a search for a ‘voice’ for Ammy for a 2nd album and Hanna, now known as Jenny, gave it a try. She not only impressed everyone for her vocals but Sang-Jun decided to mould her into a new singer sensation instead of just being a ‘voice’ for Ammy. That frustrated Ammy, who was frozen into acting serials instead of singing. She then searched for Hanna’s mentally unstable dad in the hospital, hoping to get a lead on Hanna’s mysterious disappearance. 
Jenny, heady from her ‘new-found’ fame displayed some of her familiar characteristics which puzzled Sang-Jun. He tested her and finally managed to push her into a guilt trip of confessing to being Hanna. On the actual day of her maiden concert, Jenny aka Hanna, told all her fans about her deception and acknowledged her father, whom she had refused to be acquainted with for fear of being ‘discovered’ initially.
Moral of the movie is no matter how much you change your appearance regardless by way of plastic surgery or otherwise, we can’t change our inner self or personality to suit our face. No doubt first impressions do count but I reckon personality will make a more lasting impression in the long run. Pretty or handsome faces with attitude problem to boot tend to lose their appeal very fast and is a major turn-off. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Korea, which is well-known for its majority stars who has gone under the knife to take a jibe at panning plastic surgery.
One of their most controversial singers, Harisu, who self-confessed to undergoing a sex change to become a woman, recently married her boyfriend with much fanfare surrounding it. Somebody sent me a mail on her wedding story accompanied by some ‘sexy’ pictures of her. I forwarded it to some guy friends who deleted it without opening the mail. When I questioned the fact, I was told that no matter how sexy or gorgeous the girl is, fake is fake, real is real and they much prefer the ‘natural real person’ with their imperfections in contrast to the ‘perfect plastic’ person, who may be ‘aesthetically stunning’ but lack the ‘natural touch’.
Now, the beloved cartoon has been adapted to the big screen and I got to watch it yesterday. And I’ve gotta say, I seriously don’t mind watching it another time!!! The movie is really AWESOME!!! I mean, if you were enthralled by the robots transforming in the cartoon, put it this way, the movie will make your jaw dropped. A lot of the patrons are in their 20s and 30s who probably grew up with the cartoon in their childhood. And even some young kids came along for the show, prob their offsprings and I could hear them gasping *Ooohhh* *Ahhhhh* in awe. Well, in fact, I was also one of them lar. Hehehehe…..
In a nutshell, this movie is about JOhn McClane (Bruce Willis) who saved the world (literally) from a group of high-tech hacker terrorists. Techies may appreciate the tech lingo spoken by the hackers otherwise to the rest of us, they just sound gibberish. Maggie Q served nothing more other than being a ‘vase’ (in Canto) and utter not more than 10 sentences in the entire movie. She didn’t look that attractive in the movie tho’ perhaps due to her limp hair which is like glued to her head. Gees, don’t they have an in-house stylist or something to blow their hair watnots?? On the bright side, she did manage to spar with Bruce Willis or I reckon more likely his stunt double and can’t seemed to just die no matter how badly she was thrown about! At one juncture, spotted a blooper. On one scene where she was fighting with Bruce, she got punched on the face which made it bloody but on the next scene, her hair was all smooth and face got all cleaned up oredi! Muahahahaa……the editors sure didn’t do a good job for a blunder like this to skim thru.
The enemy, Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olymphant, whom FC says is in the series “Deadwood”) has only one aloof expression throughout the entire show, which made him seemed somewhat like a robot. Talk about bad acting. As for Bruce, well, it just seemed a tad implausible at times with the amount of injuries that he sustained, he just seemed unable to die hence the title I guess or perhaps it should be renamed as “Cannot Die”. Plot is like this; he received a call one night to bring a hacker, Matthew Farrell (Justin Long) back to DC for questioning but was stopped along the way by highly-skilled assasins who wanted the hacker dead cos the hacker helped designed some security breaching device for the terrorists.
What I’m not in favour of is Bruce’s character killing without hesitation (like gangsters), which seemed to contradict a police officer detective’s role. It’s trigger-happy “Wham” “Bang” “Shoot” all the way! I mean at one point, he even shot a bullet thru himself to put down the enemy. That’s like insane! And the other illogical point? Well, it’s somewhat hilarious to see him driving a car everywhere and just hobbling with a leg injury to the enemy’s hideout so quickly when it seemed to take ages for the FBI team in helicopters to arrive. Tsk tsk tsk…..
Suffice to say, it’s very much a guy’s action movie. Just loads of action disguised on a thin plot. Plenty of cars, airplanes, helicopters ramming into each other and guns blasting at almost every scene. I reckon “Shooter” was much better in terms of acting and storyline (same lone ranger story saving the world). Wait a minute, actually, come to think of it, the theme is oddly familiar. I think this is possibly every man’s dream, being able to boost their ego becoming the hero who single-handedly saved the world from terrorists/enemies/aliens. Eg. movies like Rambo, Terminator, Indiana Jones, Speed, Jackie Chan and Jet Li movies etc etc to name a few.
Best scene is when Bruce drives a car, jumps off and the car amazingly flew off a divider and hit the helicopter crashing it down!!! Amazingly, the person inside the helicopter didn’t die and even managed to go after Bruce. Now, you tell me whether that’s logical??
