Hollywood's Boys-Only Formula

One thing that they don't warn you about, before you marry a movie critic, is that you will basically never again see a movie in the theater. Your spouse will be seeing tons of movies at odd times like 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, when you are usually expected to be working. So when you finally get around to wanting to watch something, your most reliable movie-going partner is often uninterested.

This is less of a drawback than it once was, however, because there are fewer and fewer movies that I want to see. Oh, don't get me wrong: I like robot cars blowing up scary dinosaur aliens controlled by rogue North Korean agents in the pay of pharmaceutical companies who want to kill everyone on earth so that they can use them to test their new revivifying drug. But not every weekend. Occasionally I'd like to see something with no flames in it at all, something which maybe has a few women who do something other than look alternatively mournful and sexy in clothing that is 30 percent too tight for whatever it is they are supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, there aren't so many of those movies around any more.