Laws

Barzini's Law: Nations, organizations, institutions, bodies, or single human beings are never as powerful, intelligent, far-seeing, efficient, and dangerous as they seem to their enemies.

Clarke's Three Laws:

(1.) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

(2.) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

(3.) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Hansen's Law: What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.

Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Occam's Razor: The law of parsimony, economy, or succinctness; a principle urging one to select from among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions.

Poe's Law: Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Why Good People See Bad Movies

I suspect most good people go to see bad movies for the same reason they do a lot of stuff that's not good for them: they are seeking escape. Escape from their problems. Escape from the world. Escape from the boss from Hell and the co-worker from Hades.

And sometimes... they find it.

For two hours--or at least ninety minutes -- they get to get caught up with or laugh at someone else's problems and shortcomings for a change. Never mind that the acting isn't always brilliant or the writing all that perfect -- it's the escape from reality that matters.

It would be nice to pretend that someday soon people are going to stop doing this and seek only good movies. But that's not likely.

Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of anything is crap") alone dictates that there's always going to be a certain number of bad movies made and that there always will be. Plus it's obvious from even a brief visit to the average movie messageboard that even smart, well-educated people can disagree on what constitutes a good movie -- or at least one worth watching.

In light of all that, the true wonder is not that so many bad movies are so popular but that so many good movies actually get made.