I’m part of a volunteer group at work which organizes events for early-career employees. This past Friday, we organized a Movie Day to see The Simpsons Move on the day it came out. We rented out a theatre in the afternoon and invited people who weren’t swamped with work to come see The Simpsons for free. It went pretty well and actually didn’t require a lot of planning.

I haven’t watched The Simpsons religiously in maybe 5 years. And by that I mean I haven’t even caught a single episode in the last few years. From what I hear, the quality of the jokes is no longer as good. However, it seemed like a lot of people had high hopes that the movie would be funny and great. After watching it, I can’t say that I’m overly impressed. It felt like a 22-minute episode idea that was more drawn out to fit 90 minutes. I mean the gist of the story is pretty simple which I could explain in 3 sentences. This meant that they could spend more time setting up gags and executing them, which I suppose is good for random humor.

In terms of funiness, there was never an opportunity or incident that made me laugh and laugh endlessly; and I think the rest of the audience was like that too. They had the requisite number of social commentary jokes, inside jokes for fans, and slapstick humor. Nothing huge was revealed or changed, and the town reset after the movie. Because of that, I wasn’t overly impressed and give The Simpsons 3 out of 5 stars.

Afterwards, we headed over to Kelseys for some networking, free food and drink. I think when restaurants hear that companies have something like this planned. They start jumping for joy, because they earned a lot of revenue without needing to provide a lot of service or food!

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: IBM, moviereview