One Rule To Judge Them All And In The Darkness Bind Them

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So . . . You saw the movie version of The Hobbit and it was like the parson's egg -- parts of it were excellent.  But then the gang went on Mr. Troll's Wild Ride, and you thought:  Oh dear God!  Now you can't decide how to judge the movie.  Given its virtues, can you really, with a clean conscience, declare that it's a bad movie?

Unca Mike is here to help.

Long, long ago, I formulated a rule by which one can dismiss most bad cartoons without having to endure them all the way to the end.  If the assembled good guys suddenly find themselves all in a clump, flying through the air screaming . . . that means the cartoon sucks.  It's possible that three-year-olds think this is witty.  I wouldn't know because when Sean was that age, we told him that that there were no TV shows on Saturday mornings.  But for ages five and above, it's witless.

From Dennis the Menace and his friends flying through the air in a Radio Flyer screaming to Winnie the Pooh and his friends clinging to each other while flying through the air screaming (and surely there are Disney executives who will burn in Hell for that), it's an infallible rule of thumb:  anything containing that scene is a sucky cartoon.  Doubly so if they also abruptly fall screaming down a long slide that suddenly opens up beneath them.

By this infallible rule, what you saw was not a bad movie -- it was a sucky cartoon.

I'm glad I could clear that up for you.


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