What got us here

The Carpool group decided to watch the first Simpsons movie in Festival Mall. This mall is a step down from the hyper glamourized Alabang Town Center. The restaurants are more okay than great, and the cinema floors, to this day, remain sticky due to a mixture of gum and dried up soda, but it had the schedule we needed. And c'mon, it's the Simpsons.

Sing it with me. The Simp-sooooooooooonsssss.

I usually arrive earlier than most. This movie was no different. I got there 10 minutes before showtime, and whaddya know... Peeps still be "on their way". While killing time walking around aimlessly, I saw Marco and a pissed off Gerald, some high school friends I hadn't seen since grad. We said our usual hellos. They asked me who I was with and they appeared awkward when I returned the question. 

True to form, only the Simpsons movie would attract these many Southridge Boys into the less talked about part of town. But the Simpsons was our thing. We would do anything for this show. Admittedly, it's not as funny as the couldn't-care-less South Park or the more liberal cartoons that seem to be popping up every now and then, but this shit was on when we got home. For us, Krusty's celebrity dickness, Homer's proper representation of the "below" average American intelligence level and Titania using her titanias was as hardcore as it was gonna get. This was all done in the PG local cable landscape of RPN and Studio 23.

2 minutes before showtime, everyone starts arriving. I see Perez and Wix, who by the looks of things have been here some time, wandering around the mall and avoiding my third wheel threat. The rest of the group arrived seconds after. It's like being late had to be done. Even when the Simpsons intro was a thing, in their minds, they somehow had to miss it for the sake of just being fucking late.

And then the movie began. Somehow, I came away feeling that I had outgrown this brand of comedy. And then it ended. We were like, yeah... okay. That was it.

If you look at this movie as an experience in itself, you'd be disappointed. It was repetitive, lame and a rehash of old jokes that were funny once upon a time. However, this could also be looked at as culmination of what got us here. The years investing in this family, the chats I had with girls about the Simpsons, the unexpected bond between these carpool friends, all add to this experience.

But fuck it, you pay 250 bucks for a movie (with nachos), you expect justice, not the emotions that got you here.