Lamentations

Woe is me, for I may have to restructure large sections of the current screenplay, because I came up with a kick-ass new ending; hopefully I can retrofit the story without too much disruption.

When did everyone become a critic? Do you think Ogg and Thorg sat around the cave twenty thousand years ago, debating the clan storyteller's dialogue choices after the evening's entertainment (which consisted of sitting around a fire, listening to a guy make shit up for an hour)? Or that they didn't think this chapter of Rokk Hunts a Wooly Mammoth was up to the dramatic standard set by the original? Criticism in those days probably only came in the form of being stabbed with a spear.

These days, we spend a great deal of time analyzing and dissecting and deciding whether or not a movie was Good or Bad. But entertainment is food for the mind; we need it for mental health just as much as we need regular organic food to sustain our bodies. And rarely do we spend more than a few words on the quality of food, if we do at all. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie, was sated, and thought no more of it.

Probably it's because thinking about an entertainment experience after the fact is as much a part of digesting it as is letting food run through our intestines after consuming it. But evolution has spend hundreds of millions of years giving us the tools to digest food. Do we have the same level of refinement in our tool choice for analyzing entertainment? Clearly we have the tools for complex, abstract thought. What kind of tools let us best digest a movie?