I'll teach you to laugh at something that's funny!

Just back from the local singleplex, where I sawThe Simpsons Movie (in 2D) tonight. Their show has been on a plateau for the last few years, not a decline just a plateau, but the movie takes me back to the early days of the series. It has a story arc instead of just being a series of gags, and the focus is more on the Simpson family than the supporting cast or celebrity guests, just like it was on the first few seasons of the show.

It was a lot like a 3-part Simpsons episode where the first part sets the stage, the second part leads to the crisis point (the "To be continued" point if you've seen the film), rand the third part resolves the story. It follows a standard story plot, rather than the flow of recent Simpsons episodes, where situation A leads to unrelated situation B, and so on and so forth until situation Z, when the show ends. It takes good writing to do shows like that, but would grow tiring if the shows were 90 minutes long instead of 30 minutes long.

And the Simpsons Movie is even shorter than 90 minutes in length! I went to the 5:00 show and was home for dinner by 6:40, even with the previews and the ten minute drive home. There are some raunchy bits to give it the PG13 rating: casual drug use, frontal exposure, using the Lord's name in vain, but no one dropped any f-bombs, even if it would have been funny to see America's cartoon family cursing like the kids on South Park.